I'm thinking of something like Gource that could be applied to the Stack Exchange family of sites. What do you think?
5 Answers
In the same spirit as amelvin's answer, except this time we're pulling data from the API, so we can ignore all the cruft like 'tag' and 'ago', here's a few interesting ones (Hover for description):
Any other suggestions for this is of course welcome
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@YOU The raw data for that one: jsfiddle.net/rkV6Q/2 The word 'gas' appeared 7 times, which is pretty high considering that we're talking about comment's text here– Yi JiangMar 20, 2011 at 17:08
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4On the second cloud you can clearly read "please" "make" "things" "work". :-) Mar 21, 2011 at 11:28
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1Have I just not had enough coffee yet, or are c# and .net missing from the 'tags' tag cloud??– AakashMMar 21, 2011 at 11:40
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1@AakashM Punctuations are stripped, so C# would became C (though C is also gone because of the 'ignore common words' option I think), while .Net become Net I think. In retrospect I think I should rerun the thing with both option off– Yi JiangMar 21, 2011 at 12:49
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Try the "advanced" interface, which lets you use arbitrary strings (such as C#). Mar 21, 2011 at 13:44
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1You should also answer that question : meta.stackexchange.com/questions/122900/…– user230564Feb 15, 2015 at 17:43
Since Gource is by default for commit logs, I ran Gource on the SO log, but even with playing around with the options, I can't get it to give me something decently short. Rather than do the entire commit history, here's a 2-minute clip of the last month:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt7ItrdXbIg
Here's a screenshot - the branches are directories and the leaves are files. In the video, it also shows people flying around representing the users doing the commits.
Ok, so this is all well and good, but not really about the site topic. (; I originally thought (read: didn't bother to check) that their custom log format could be used for visualizing tags - which is why I started to fool around with it at all.
If you want to use Gource to visualize something other than the supported log formats, there is a pipe ('|') delimited custom log format option:
- timestamp - A unix timestamp of when the update occured.
- username - The name of the user who made the update.
- type - initial for the update type - (A)dded, (M)odified or (D)eleted.
- file - Path of the file updated.
- colour - A colour for the file in hex (FFFFFF) format. Optional.
Example: 1275543595|andrew|A|src/main.cpp
Given that log format, I'm not sure I see Gource itself being a good fit for this.
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I wonder if this kind of representation can be applied to tags, where a tag is a node and a line goes to other tags used on the same post, and where the intensity of the line is the number of times the two linked tags are used together. Mar 21, 2011 at 12:30
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@Rebecca - what log did you run this on, btw? The video isn't satisfying enough (thanks for uploading though!), I'd like to run Gource myself. Mar 22, 2011 at 0:20
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@ThomasOwens, see my edit regarding their log format and tying this into tags. Mar 22, 2011 at 0:22
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You should play with the Gource's options a bit - it's more fun when you can see names of the main modules/folders, and committers. Mar 22, 2011 at 7:14
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@ripper234, those are on by default - I did play with them to turn them off! Wayyyyy too busy with them on. Mar 22, 2011 at 14:28
I think a Wordle does something interesting along these lines - cutting and pasting the current SO front page text (probably not the best implementation) creates:
Or even this Tagxedo visualization:
It would be nice to have something like this Icons of the Web poster, but then with user accounts in stead of icons, and scaled by different variables e.g. reputation (off course), number of answers, number of questions, ...
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