I’ve been playing around with gephi today, to see what I could come up with to display the discussion threads from my research data. Lots of manual data entry later, and I’ve got this:
and this:
WordPress sites are shown in red, Blackboard discussion forums in blue. So far, just a pretty picture, but I’ll hopefully be able to coax out a diagram or two that shows the difference in interaction patterns between the two platforms…
Lots of “manual data entry”? What haven’t you been able to automate that you’d like to?
I’m comparing data pulled from two completely different discussion board platforms, in different formats. I’ve had to recreate the interaction tree (setting parent-child relationships on nodes/rows) manually. Not difficult, but tedious. Thankfully, I’m only dealing with 400-ish entries…
Also, adding the Community of Inquiry coding data, and other metadata to each entry/node/row in a consistent manner has been a manual process. Which is actually OK, because I’d developed a decent workflow, and it helped me see patterns and things I could do with the data as it was entered.
What does the data look like in each case? Or is the manual coding actually a guilty pleasure?!
it’s largely my fault – I exported the discussions as HTML archives, and then had to scrub the export to anonymize all content. Then I dumped that as a PDF for archival purposes. Also, the data came from Blackboard 8 and WordPress, which have different export options available, so I’d be recreating something to normalize the data and metadata anyway. Fun stuff.