Learning often works through associations. In this article we demonstrate how one can enhance one’s knowledge through the use of network graphs, which provide a good overview and at the same time can reveal the limits and the frontiers that are to be explored.
Excel was a revolutionary product for the time, but in the 21st century columns and rows are not sufficient anymore. What matters today are multidimensional relations between data, which combine a better view of the bigger picture with an attention to detail: networks and graphs.
Every year in December Vladimir Putin addresses the Russian Federal Assembly. His address is considered to be a good indicator of the current political mood in the country. Putin’s 2014 speech is especially interesting, because it concerns not only Russia but the whole world. We at Nodus Labs together with Way to Russai analyzed Vladimir Putin’s address made on the 4th of December 2014 using text network analysis and below we present a report on what we discovered. We also made a comparison of the 2014 speech to the 6 speeches before from the years 2008-2013 to see how presidential rhetorics evolved over time.
How text network analysis can be used for website SEO. We use an example of a travel guide website to find out what people are searching for in relation to travel, what they actually find, and how well the travel guide website studied responds to the needs of the users. We also explore the idea of content polysingularity ensuring that information offered within the website does not only fulfil the readers’ needs, but also helps them learn more and discover new perspectives about the topics they’re interested in.
When we read a text, we normally follow it in quite a linear fashion: from left to right, from top to bottom. Even when we skim articles quickly online, the trajectory is still the same. However, this is not the most efficient method of reading: in the age of hypertext we tend to create our own narratives using the bits and pieces from different sources. This is an easy task with short Tweets or Facebook posts, but it becomes much more difficult when we’re dealing with newspaper articles, books, scientific papers. The amount of information we’re exposed to increases from day to day, so there’s a challenge of finding the new tools, which would enable us to deal with this overload.
As a response to this challenge we at Nodus Labs developed a new free online software tool Textexture.Com, which visualizes any text as a network and enables the user to use this interactive visualization to read through the text in a non-linear fashion. Using the network one can see the most relevant topics inside the text organized as distinctively colored clusters of nodes, their relationship to one another, and the most influential words inside the text, responsible for topic shifts. This way the user can navigate right into the topic of the text that is the most relevant to them and use the bigger (more influential) nodes to shift into another subject.
