OUseful.Info, the blog…

Picking up on Brian Kelly’s traffic seeking #Sherlock post (Isn’t #Sherlock Great! (TV & a ‘Second Screen’ For the Twitter Generation)), I just made a quick tweak to my emergent social positioning code to have a peek at who’s commonly followed by the folk who’ve recently been using the #sherlock tag on Twitter.

By running a search at around 10.15pm for the most recent 1500 tweets using the #sherlock hashtag I grabbed a list of tag users; I then filtered this down to select users who had used the tag twice within the sample set, leaving a set of about 250 users or so. I then found the friends of this sample set (that is, lists of all the people they follow) and constructed a graph of folk followed by a sample of hashtag users. I then filtered this graph to nodes with a degree of 75 or more, a crude way of capturing folk who are followed by a significant number of the tag using sample set and excluding folk in the tag sample set who only follow a few folk.

Here’s the result – the quick’n'dirty interpretation is that it gives a quick sketch of which folk on Twitter are followed en masse by folk who were using the #sherlock hashtag (subject to all sorts of sampling errors…which is why it’s just a sketch…).

If we relax the network degree filter to 25, this is what we get (nodes sized according to eigenvector centrality and coloured according to groups identified using the Gephi modularity cluster statistic):

The Beeb’s programme page for the second series of Sherlock supports buzz tracking (see the buzz here), but I don’t think it tries to do much in the way of mapping social positioning?

PS it’s also possible to search for a URL on twitter to see who’s been tweeting it recently… Running a search for the most recent (23.40) 500 tweets containing a link to the blog of Dr John Watson, I discovered 320 or so twitter users. Projecting from them to their friends and filtering the resulting graph to nodes of degree 20 or more, here’s how Dr Watson’s blog is socially positioned in the sense of mapping folk who are commonly followed by folk who have recently tweeted a link to the blog.

THe question is: what’s this actually useful for?

PS see also Social Media Interest Maps of Newsnight and BBCQT Twitterers which starts to explore ways of comparing interests of folk tweeting around different hashtags.

You may or may not have noticed that the Boundary Commission released their take on proposed parliamentary constituency boundaries today.

They could have released the data – as data – in the form of shape files that can be rendered at the click of a button in things like Google Maps… but they didn’t… [The one thing the Boundary Commission quango forgot to produce: a map] (There are issues with publishing the actual shapefiles, of course. For one thing, the boundaries may yet change – and if the original shapefiles are left hanging around, people may start to draw on these now incorrect sources of data once the boundaries are fixed. But that’s a minor issue…)

Instead, you have to download a series of hefty PDFs, one per region, to get a flavour of the boundary changes. Drawing a direct comparison with the current boundaries is not possible.

The make-up of the actual constituencies appears to based on their member wards, data which is provided in a series of spreadsheets, one per region, each containing several sheets describing the ward makeup of each new constituency for the counties in the corresponding region.

It didn’t take long for the data junkies to get on the case though. From my perspective, the first map I saw was on the Guardian Datastore, reusing work by University of Sheffield academic Alasdair Rae, apparently created using Google Fusion Tables (though I haven’t see a recipe published anywhere? Or a link to the KML file that I saw Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers/@smfrogers tweet about?)

[I knew I should have grabbed a screen shot of the original map...:-(]

It appears that Conrad Quilty-Harper (@coneee) over at the Telegraph then got on the case, and came up with a comparative map drawing on Rae’s work as published on the Datablog, showing the current boundaries compared to the proposed changes, and which ties the maps together so the zoom level and focus are matched across the maps (MPs’ constituencies: boundary changes mapped):

Interestingly, I was alerted to this map by Simon tweeting that he liked the Telegraph map so much, they’d reused the idea (and maybe even the code?) on the Guardian site. Here’s a snapshot of the conversation between these two data journalists over the course of the day (reverse chronological order):

Here’s the handshake…

I absolutely love this… and what’s more, it happened over the course of four or five hours, with a couple of technology/knowledge transfers along the way, as well as evolution in the way both news agencies communicated the information compared to the way the Boundary Commission released it. (If I was evil, I’d try to FOI the Boundary Commission to see how much time, effort and expense went into their communication effort around the proposed changes, and would then try to guesstimate how much the Guardian and Telegraph teams put into it as a comparison…)

At the time of writing (15.30), the BBC have no data driven take on this story…

And out of interest, I also wondered whether Sheffield U had a take…

Maybe not…

PS By the by, the DataDrivenJournalism.net website relaunched today. I’m honoured to be on the editorial board, along with @paulbradshaw @nicolaskb @mirkolorenz @smfrogers and @stiles, and looking forward to seeing how we can start to drive interest, engagement and skills development in, as well as analysis and (re)use of, and commentary on, public open data through the data journalism route…

PPS if you’re into data journalism, you may also be interested in GetTheData.org, a question and answer site in the model of Stack Overflow, with an emphasis on Q&A around how to find, access, and make use of open and public datasets.

I’m on holiday, but I can’t stop pondering (again) how to make more of an OU flavoured collection of content currently on BBC iPlayer… Whilst bookmarking a few more BBC/OU co-pro series pages just now, I spotted one series at least has had clips posted in to the (new to me) BBC Learning Zone Class Clips:

Which got me wondering: if OU does fully funded co-pros of content that ends up in the Learning Zone Class Clips area, wouldn’t it be good if the clips listings also displayed the OU logo…?

Or maybe if the OU got a mention on the actual clips pages?

After all, the OU gets a mention, and a link, on the original programme page:

And arguably, we could do more to support learning journey related actions and resources at the more detailed, class clips level?

PS Hmmm, I wonder how things like Class Clips fit into OER space???

PPS QUIck note re: bookmarked series pages; there are also occasions when the OU co-pros an occasional episode in a longer running series, as in the case of BBC CLick Radio (World Service), which runs weekly but only has occasional OU co-pro’d episodes? From a series page linking to episode pages, how would I identify the OU co-pro’d programme pages? Or would I have to ignore series pages and just bookmark/index actual co-pro’d episode pages (if they exist?)?

PPPS Ah – this looks interesting (BBC prototype): THe Programme List (“Add entire shows, series or just episodes, See which of your programmes are available today”). So I should be able to add in lists of OU/BBC co-pros, and see a view over episodes that are currently available on iPlayer. Which makes me think: could something like The Programmes List also be used to publish and view 3rd party curated collection lists, opening up “scheduling” of BBC content to all-comers?

Ever since the Open University was founded, a relationship with the BBC has provided the OU with a route to broadcast through both television and radio. Some time ago, I posted a recipe for generating a page that showed current OU programmes on iPlayer (all rotted now…). Chatting to Liam last night, I started wondering about resurrecting this service, as well as pondering how I could easily begin to build up an archive of programme IDs for OU/BBC co-pros, so that whenever the fancy took me I could go to a current and comprehensive “OU on iPlayer” page and see what OU co-pro’d content was currently available to watch again.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious feed anywhere that gives access to this information, nor a simple directory page listing OU co-pros with links even to the parent series page or series identifier on the BBC site. (This would be lovely data to have in the OU’s open linked data store;-)

What caught my attention about this feed is that it’s focussed on growing audience around live broadcasts. This is fine if you’re tweeting added value* along with the live transmission and turning the programme into an event, but in general terms? I rarely watch live television any more, but I do watch a lot of iPlayer…

(* the Twitter commentary feed can than also be turned into expert commentary subtitles/captions, of course, using Martin Hawksey’s Twitter powered iPlayer subtitles recipe..)

There is also a “what’s on” feed available from OpenLearn (via a link – autodiscovery doesn’t seem to be enabled?), but it is rather horrible and it doesn’t contain BBC programme/series IDs (and I’m not sure the linked to pages necessarily do so, either?)

So – what to do? In the short term, as far as my tinkering goes, nothing (holidays…:-) But I think with a nice feed available, we could make quite a nice little view over OU co-pro’d content currently on iPlayer, and also start to have a think about linking in expert commentary, as well as linking out to additional resources…

See also:
Augmenting OU/BBC Co-Pro Programme Data With Semantic Tags
Linked Data Without the SPARQL – OU/BBC Programmes on iPlayer [this actually provides a crude recipe for getting access to OU/BBC programmes by bookmarking co-pro'd series pages on delicious...]

PS from @liamgh: “Just noticed that Wikipedia lists both BBC & OU as production co e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtu… RH Panel readable with dbpedia.” Interesting… so we should be able to pull down some OU/BBC co-pros by a query onto DBPedia…

PPS also from Liam – a handy recipe for generating an HTML5 leanback UI for video content identified via a SPARQL query: An HTML5 Leanback TV webapp that brings SPARQL to your living room

“A booktalk in the broadest terms is what is spoken with the intent to convince someone to read a book.” Wikipedia

Whilst putting together yesterday’s post about personal art collections online (for a wider take on this, see Mia Ridge’s The rise of the non-museum (and death by aggregation), which offers all manner of food for thought around personal collection building…), I started thinking again about how we might use recorded discussions or book talks focussing on particular books as a component in the “content scaffolding” around works that might be used as resources in an informal learning context.

(For an earlier foray in to the book talk world, see my post on BBC “In Our Time” Reading List using Linked Data.)

So the (really simple and obvious) idea is this (and I fully appreciate other sites out there may already exist that do this: if so, please let me know in the comments): how about we build a lookup service that allows you to search by author, book title, ISBN (or cross ISBN), and it returns details for the book as well as links to audio or video recordings of book talks around the book.

I’ve started trying to cobble together a few resources around this, setting up (a not yet complete set of) scrapers (in various states of disrepair) on Scraperwiki to collate books and book talk audio links from:

• TechNation (scraper)
• Authors@Google (scraper) [only author names? No book info? Maybe if the date of upload was captured we could guess at the book tour from the scheduling of it?]
• BBC Radio 4′s A Good Read (scraper)
• BBC Radio 4′s Book Club (scraper)
• BBC Radio 4′s Start The Week (scraper)
• BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time (scraper) [okay, this isn't strictly discussing books; but it is abut ideas and there are links to books in the programme notes]
• Philosophy Bites (scraper) [again, not about books per se, but a good context for conversational sensemaking around ideas contained in easily linked to books on the topic written by the author?]
• [probably untold other podcasts...]
• Guardian Books podcast
• BBC Combined book related podcasts

It might also be appropriate to try to pull in “quality” book reviews* to annotate book listings, given that part of my idea at least is to find ways of enriching reading book references with discussion around them that can help folk make sense of the big ideas contained within the book, as well as maybe encouraging them to buy the book (the all required sustainability model: in this case, Amazon referral fees! Note that several of the sites use Amazon referrals as part of their own sustainability model. So it would only be fair to use their affiliate codes at least part of the time if their playable audio content was embedded on the site (even if that content is openly licensed… Share and share alike, right?! That is, trickle back a portion of any income you do make off the work of others, even if it is openly licensed for commercial use;-)

Another strand to all of this, of course, is sensemaking annotations around books pulled from “OERs” (what is is about education that makes the sector want its content to be somehow regarded as “special” and deserving of all sorts of qualification?!;-)

*Maybe the Guardian Platform API or one of the New York Times APIs could play a role here?

So, as ever, I’ve made a start, and as ever, that’ll probably be the end of it…. Sigh… Nice thought while it lasted though…

PS if I were to do next steps, it would probably to take the scraped data and try to normalise it in some ad hoc way in a triple store, maybe on the Talis platform? Note that in the current incarnation, some of the scraped BBC data contains multiple book references in a single record, and thise should be spearated out; also note that a lot of book references are informal (author/title), though I did manage to grab ISBNs (I think?!) from the IT COnversations/Tech Nation pages.

PPS In passing, I note that some of the older archived episodes of A Good Read have been split into chapters covering the different books reviewed in the programme? Was this some sort of experimental enrichment, or just the start of a more general roll out of chapterisation…?

A few months ago, the art discovery website Artfinder appeared on the scene, providing a place to go to view art (online) from galleries around the world, build your own collections, receive recommendations about other artworks you might like to see (and maybe go and visit for real) and so on. A “Magic Tour” feature allows you to select three art works you like from sets of four, and then view a personalised art collection based on recommendations derived from your selection. Where quality prints of a work are available, there is an option to buy the print (for example, via MemoryPrints).

A couple of other related things that have crossed my radar over the course of the year include the Google Art Project, which offers very high definition reproductions of artworks from galleries around the world, and the JISC funded OpenART project, “a partnership between the University of York, the Tate and technical partners, Acuity Unlimited, will design and expose linked open data for an important research dataset entitled ‘The London Art World 1660-1735′”.

Today, I noticed the launch of a new BBC site, Your Paintings [announcement], which offers you the ability to create art collections, locate artworks by physical gallery location and so on… Hmmmm… (As yet, the URLs don’t seem to support content negotiation as a result of adding a .json or .xml suffix to pircture or gallery page; that is, as yet, the service doesn’t appear to be offering linkable data (hyperdata?) views over the content).

There was a time when Microsoft used to be charged with unfairly influencing the market, announcing it was about to release some feature or product that a rival was trying to market, effectively stifling competition through brand and market dominance. If you read the tech blogs, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, et al. currently find themselves in a regular situation where the services, applications or features they release are heralded as being likely to wipe out competition in a niche discovered, created, or developed by a startup elsewhere (only in many cases it doesn’t quite work out that way…Bit.ly surviced Twitter’s shortener, Google Buzz threatened no-one, Facebook Places or Google Latitude haven’t squashed Foursquare, etc.).

The BBC has itself faced challenges regarding “anticompetitive”/fair trading behaviour, for example in local online news (local news video), catchup services/internet TV (Canvas) or (BBC Jam).

Now I’m generally a fan of the BBC, but I do wonder what additional value Your Paintings brings, especially given that it’s not apparently being launched with any additional technical capacity building features (i.e. it’s not (yet?) making metadata freely available for others to build on, though a couple of recent tweets suggest this may be on the timeline…)?

Having come across aNobii today (via @maireadoconnor), a service that offers “an online reading community built by readers for readers allowing you to shelve, find and share books”, I wonder: is this another area where the BBC could just “step in”, presumably as a way of building community around the wide variety of programming it offers that have good hooks in to books?

[Disclaimer: I've ranted before about the BBC not making more use of structured markup around book identifiers, but if they were to get into reading groupsm this would presumably provide the technical underpinnings...? (e.g. BBC "In Our Time" Reading List using Linked Data.) So I maybe should be careful what I wish for...]

So the point of this post? Just to note my confusion about what it is the BBC actually does, and how it does it… I know that it’s not just about the telly and the radio, but I’m not sure what it is about when it comes to the web?

And it’s not just confusion about the BBC’s role. It also extends to the public facing role of the OU, which I personally view as having more a “public service education” remit than the rest of the UK HE sector (whether this is a view than can survive the increasingly businesslike culture of higher education I don’t know…). In other words: to what extent should the OU be doing more in the way of education related online public service broadcasting?

PS so I wonder:

How much has the BBC allocated to its opening salvo on a Your Paintings AdWords campaign…?

I didn’t follow the twitter backchannel surrounding the second part of Adam Curtis’ documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, but I did see a tweet that made me grab a snapshot of the friend connections between folk who were tweeting around it using the awobmolg hashtag. The following shows the major connected component (unconnected tweeps are filtered out) of a network built up from folk using the hashtag and how they’re connected (node size a function of authority, I think?):

I guess you could argue that this provides a glimpse over part of the UK’s tweeting digerati community, though I’m not sure what part…? Nodes are layed out using a force directed layout algorithm and clustered according to modularity group. I think I can spot culture/education sector, open gov/data advocacy and media folk clusters in there. If you want to look deeper, here’s the data set I grabbed as a Gephi/gdf file.

@mhawksey also managed to grab approx 1500 or so of the #awobmolg tagged tweets into the Archive tab of this spreadsheet: awobmolg tweets

And by the by, here are cotags used in tweets alongside the #awobmolg tagged tweets I captured:

FIFA
EgyptsLostCities
Fuller
Cybernetics
BBC
therapeuticcommunity
Chaos
synergy
AWOBMOLG
Springwatch
TheMatrix
BGT
gameofthrones
politics
awobmolg
Bruntland
BBC2
anarchy
TheMotherofAllDemos
downsideofrain
TheStoryofIreland
marking
springwatch
RDLaing
powerofTV
spacearchaeology
gkchesterton
bbc
poetry
uep
notanetutopian
boomboom
systems
Bilderberg
adamcurtis
PaulMertonsHollywood
biofeedbackloop
allwatchedoverbymachinesoflovinggrace
socialmediacommodification
GameOfThrones
curtis
mature
bioweb
OctoberGallery
Freedom
shsn
BlatterOut
IIW
superinjunctions
banks
ple
psychoville
bgt
wtf
bollocks
AWObMoLG
ecosystems
buckyballs
Bbc2
alife
glee
anarchism
NIN
Observer
StarttheWeek
ecosystem
Twitter
silos
fb
UKUncut
Amortality
feedbackloop
honestly
eek
balancedequilibrium
Awobmolg
anarchist
bbc2
BBCTwo

ps via @josswinn, an archive of Adam Curtis films

This week saw the latest episode in the OU/BBC World Service Click (radio) co-produced season on openness, with a focus this week on privacy… You can hear an extended version of the discussion between entrepeneurial journalism and openness advocate, Jeff Jarvis, and professional contrarian, Andrew Keen: Privacy in a connected world

Unfortunately, the episode aired just too early to pick up up on this week’s “Who needs privacy?!” news, and in particular the new iPhone’s “secret” location logging behaviour: iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go; (find out how to see where your iPhone thinks you’ve been here: Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves); but the discussion is a great one, so I encourage you to listen to it…(I’ll be asking questions later!;-)

The programme also saw the launch of its new hashtag: #bbcClickRadio

Whilst the Digital PlanetClick twitter audience is still dwarfed by the Digital Planet Listeners’ Facebook group, I’m keen to see if we can try to grow it… one way might be to show who’s recently been tweeting about the programme, and encourage people to start following each other and chatting about the issues raised in the programme a little bit more – something Gareth Mitchell (@garethm) can now pick up on at least on the first airing, as Click now goes out live…. So to that end, I’m going to try to work up a special version of my Twtter friendviz application that shows connections between folk who’ve recently tweeted a particular term, and in this case, the #bbcClickRadio hashtag. To see the map, visit http://bit.ly/bbcclickradiocommunity.

As a tease, here’s a rather more polished version of a map I grabbed recently…

(Unfortunately, the live one is unlikely to ever look like this!)

PS I wonder if the investigation into the iPhone tracking was inspired by the recent story about German politician Malte Spitz who managed to obtain a copy of the data his phone provider had stored about his location… Zeit Online: Tell-all telephone (If you want to play with the data, it’s available from there…)

If you’re a regular listener of BBC Radio 4, you will almost certainly have come across In Our Time, a weekly, single topic discussion programme (with a longstanding archive of listen again material) hosted by Melvyn Bragg on matters scientific, philosophical, historical and cultural. In certain respects, In Our Time may be thought of as discussion based audio encyclopedia. The format sees a panel of three experts (made up of academics, commentators and critics knowledgeable on the topic for that week) teaching the host about the topic. A diligent student, he will of course have done some background reading, and posted links to the references consulted on the programme’s web page.

I’ve already had a quick play with the In Our Time data, looking to see how easy it is to relate programmes to expert academics from various UK universities (Visualising OU Academic Participation with the BBC’s “In Our Time”), but I also wondered whether it would be possible to do anything with the book references, such as using them to identify courses that may be related to a particular programme; (this is reminiscent of a couple of MOSAIC competition entries that looked at ways of recommending books based on courses, and courses based on books using @daveyp’s data from Huddersfield University library that associated course codes with the books borrowed by students taking those courses).

Being a lazy sort, I posted an idea to the OKF Ideas Incubator suggesting that it might be worth considering extracting references from In Our Time programme pages and then reconciling them with Linked Data representations of the corresponding book data.

And then, as if by magic, a solution appeared, from Orangeaurochs: “In Our Time” booklist which describes a method for parsing out the book data and then getting a Linked Data resource reference back from Bibliographica.

The original recipe suggested screenscraping the raw book references from the page HTML, but I posted a comment (at the time of writing, still in the moderation queue) which suggests:

Hi
Great to see you taking this challenge on. Re your step 2 – obtaining the reading list – a possibly more structured way of doing this is to get the appropriate section out of the xml or json representation of the programme page (eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d.xml or http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d.json).

I wonder if the BBC will start to structure the data even more – for example by adding explicitly marked up biblio data to book references?

Anyway, you can see an example of the results at pages with URLs of the form http://www.aurochs.org/inourtime_booklist/inourtime_booklist_v1.php?http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d – just add the appropriate IOT programme page URL to extract the data from it.

There are a few hit and misses, but it’s a great start, and something that can be used as a starting point for thinking about how to annotate programme related booklists with structured bibliographic data and exploring what that might mean in a world of linked educational resources that can also reference linked BBC content… :-)

PS Hmmm, I wonder what other programmes are associated with books? A Good Read and Desert Island Discs certainly…

The second in the OU’s co-produced season of programmes with the BBC World Service Digital Planet radio programme is now available on the Digital Planet podcast feed, this week covering the topic of “Ownership and Openness” and featuring OU Senior Lecturer (and intellectual property geek;-) Ray Corrigan.

In the spirit of openness, wherever possible we’re trying to open up access to full length versions of the interviews used in the programme on the OpenLearn website. So for example, if you want to hear fuller length interviews recorded from Brazil’s Campus Party, as covered in the opening episode of the openness series, you can find them here: Campus Party Brasil 2011 – The Digital Planet Interviews.

Interviewees include Jon “Maddog” Hall on Free as in Freedom, not as in price and Sir Tim Berners Lee on net neutrality, opening up data, why open data is important and on WIkileaks.

The OpenLearn site also hosts a recording of Al Gore’s Campus Party 2011 Keynote which I don’t think received an airing on either Digital Planet, or Digital Planet’s sister World Service TV programme, Click?

And as if that’s not enough, the audio clips have been made available as MP3 files, which means you can download them to your own device, or embed them in your own web pages… Like this:

Sir Tim Berners Lee on why open data is important:

If you can think of any other ways we can open up the programmes, please let us know:-)

To keep up-to-date with the OU Digital Planet extras, keep your eye on the OpenLearn Digital Planet profile page, or even better, subscribe to the OpenLearn/Digital Planet RSS feed:-)