Australian Research Council Support

● 3-year (2004-2006) ARC Discovery Project Grant “New Methods for Researching the Existence and Impact of Political Networks on the WWW– Robert Ackland and Rachel Gibson (ANU)

● ARC Special Research Initiative (e-Research Support) Grant to establish VOSON and conduct demonstrator project– Robert Ackland, Rachel Gibson, Mathieu O'Neil (ANU),

Bruce Bimber (UCSB), Stephen Ward (OII, Oxford)

Software - current status

● VOSON is "powered" by uberlink - web-based research software that facilitates the collection and analysis of online network data. uberlink is built using open-source software components and features: – PhP and javascript web interface– MySQL database– Perl-based web crawler and – Interface to the Google API– Data manipulation and analysis routines Perl and C++.

Analysis of data from WWW

● Data preparation– Web data are inherently noisy - the inclusion of

irrelevant pages into the study ("topic drift") needs to be minimised.

– Choice of unit of analysis - while data are collected at the page-level, analysis is generally conducted over aggregations of pages - need methods for meaningfully aggregating pages.

– Machine learning methods will be useful.

Analysis of data from WWW

● Data visualisation– Visualisation of networks is important for their study.– Key is to find visualisation software that can work

with large network graphs within web-based application.

– Directed minimum spanning tree showing all nodes connected to a particular root node is displayed using LGL layout algorithm.

Outbound links from

www.oevp.at - LGL layout

Outbound links from

www.oevp.at - HypViewer

Outbound links from

www.oevp.at - HypViewer

Analysis of data from WWW● Data visualisation (cont.)

– The LGLViewer provides an abstraction of a network since it only shows the shortest path between the root node and all other connected nodes in the database.

– To visualise all nodes and all links simultaneously a force-directed graphing (FDG) algorithm is used.

– Web sites are given initial random positions and modelled as electrostatic charges (global repulsion forces). Hyperlinks between web sites are modelled as springs (attraction forces) that move nodes to minimise the energy of the system thus revealing web clusters.

Analysis of data from WWW

● Data analysis– Crosstabulations (composition of dataset and links

to/from seed sites) is provided in uberlink– Network datasets can be downloaded and analysed

further using social network analysis software– Plans to access R sna package routines from within uberlink

Research projects● New forms of Collection Action on the WWW● Online networking behaviour of political parties● Structural properties of far-right networks● Information on the WWW for potential migrants● The abortion debate on the WWW● Sampling of web data● Dynamics of conflict in online communities: a

field theoretical approach● Modelling the link economy

e-Research plans

● While uberlink is currently generating data and analysis for research, there are clear technological constraints relating to data management, computation and resource sharing that prevent large-scale collaborative research. We aim to overcome these constraints via the use of e-research technologies, possibly by exposing key features of uberlink (computational and webmining code, visualisation engines, databases) as Grid or web services.