Tag: octel

As a “shot to nothing”, it being that snooker time of year. A minimal netwrok visualisation of some of the #octel forum activity, which has a structure of: forum(-forum)-topic-reply. Replies can be threaded in a topic, in which case the replies have the same parent but also carry an incremental “menu_order” attribute that gives the accession order of the reply within that thread (I think?).

A post_type attribute identifies whether an entry is a forum, topic or reply.

I grabbed three columns of data defining an edge list – parentID, postID, post_type (forum, topic or reply), and threw the data into Gephi. Different layout types bring out different structural elements, but I just wanted something quick and dirty to look at the data in “unthreaded” form to see how we might make use of the thread/menu_order data.

Here’s an example – the whole structure (not very compellingly laid out, it has to be said):

We can also filter by edge type to get a hint of the actual structure, for example, the forum structure (i.e. how forums and subforums (child forums) relate to each other):

Or the topic structure (how topics relate to forums):

Or the reply structure (how replies fall into topics):

Note that this is the one we need to work on, in respect of finessing the data to allow us to see the hierarchical nature of the thread structure within a topic.

Anyway, as I said, a shot to nothing, and something to ponder representation wise as I walk the dog…;-)