Text Miners: The “Power of Semantic Enhancement”

/ Katja Reuter

I find this an excellent example how a basic review article originally published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases can be enriched in its content. Even though this might be more relevant to general knowledge management, I would be interested in exploring whether we could apply some of these tools to the Virtual Home portal.

Computational biologists used tagged terms such as disease names, institutions, places, people, organisms, which can be turned off and on. If you click on document summary you will find not only a study summary, but also a tag cloud of highlighted terms, tag trees of individual semantic classes of highlighted terms, ontology terms, document statistics, and a citation analysis.

As Evie Browne, Publication Manager, PLoS Computational Biology writes: “With a single click you can re-arrange the reference list by number of times each paper is cited, or add in the authors’ analysis of how the reference is used in the paper (obtains background from, confirms, extends, shares authors with, uses method in). The group has also provided interactive versions of some of the figures: compare the original, static Figure 3 to the moveable, overlaying, enhanced version.”

More information about semantic publishing is available in the original article.

Twitter – a powerful platform?

/ Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

The debate on the usefulness of Twitter is ongoing and whether it could serve communication and promotion efforts at big research institutions in one way or another. I am still befuddled what Twitter could offer that email and text messaging are not doing already.

I came across the post “Nine Ways to Use Twitter” by John C. Dvorak who explains why he thinks Twitter is a valuable service. Some of his arguments may be interesting to some of you. Surprisingly, he concludes that there may be nothing to get from Twitter, unless one invents a use, which – I guess – leaves all options open for further discussions.

Some of Dvorak’s use cases:

  • Tweeting about an event: something solitary is turned into an interactive, shared experience.
  • Spread of breaking news updates/announcements/ public address system: “when a major event happens, often a Twitterer will be there tweeting about it on the spot”.
  • Contact multiple people who work within an organization using the mobile service feature to easily broadcast a quick message to all of them.
  • Easy feedback mechanism for writings etc.
  • Asking and answering questions is easier than with e-mail, almost instantaneous
  • Poll people/crowd-sourcing information/audience voting

Research Networking: “Scientists caught up in fictional friend network on Facebook”

/ Katja Reuter

Since research networking resounds throughout the scientific community, the article “Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit” awoke my interest. It talks about a new case of a bogus network on Facebook of  “more than 100 scientists, policy-makers and journalists linked to stem-cell research, whose identities have been purloined.”  Even though the perpetrators and their motives remain unknown, an interesting assumption was made that through a false profile and a network around it a researcher may obtain “sensitive information from a hoodwinked competitor”. I am not sure that I understand completely how that would work in detail, but maybe some of you can offer more explanations. Other than that, the article also helps to understand the reluctance of some scientists concerning research networking.

Tangential Thoughts: Data collection with mobile phones and human-tracking systems in scientific research

/ Katja Reuter

 

I call this post Tangential Thoughts, since it focuses on what the research community things about communication technology, which might be interesting to some of you.

I found two articles: One talks about how researchers more and more use mobile phones to collect data. In “Personal technology: Phoning in data” Roberta Kwok explores how “budget-conscious” and “digitally savvy scientists can write and distribute mobile-phone software for everything from monitoring traffic to reporting invasive species”. Maybe this is something for us to keep in mind and exploring?

Another article titled “Big Brother has evolved” by Jerome E. Dobson mentions human-tracking systems in scientific research. Dobson argues that the “social-networking benefits of human-tracking systems will surely be substantial” and that” the technology is bound to alter all sorts of social relationships”, including the one between researcher and subject. Yet, “investigators need to understand the risks as well as the benefits of new research opportunities”. His conclusion is not at all comforting, though: “We have entered a grand social experiment as momentous as any in our past and yet one so insidious that hardly anyone seems to have noticed”.

 

Google Analytics site overlay problems & alternatives

/ Cynthia Piontkowski / 6 Comments

Shortcomings of GA site overlay: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/03/17/site-overlay-issues-google-analytics/   It counts pageviews, not clicks on particular links, according to this blogger.

Alternatives: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/03/27/alternatives-site-overlay/  Some services offer detailed click analysis, but they’re not free.

Existing tools that visualize web network data

/ minikahlon

heatmap_egHere’s a good list of automatically mined network visualizations, mostly leveraging Internet data.  Found it while searching for do-it-yourself network visualization tools which I could use to play with my own real network relations and embed in my blog.  We’re looking at ways to track link utilization on the virtual home website – the visualization show above from Crazy Egg is certainly a neat trick (if not actually analytically useful)

Mega Menus

/ Cynthia Piontkowski / 3 Comments

An appealing alternative to standard hard to navigate dropdown menus; options are shown in one large panel that allows for categorization, icons, etc. Article at Sitepoint: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/30/mega-drop-down-menus/

Examples:

I suspect it would be a challenge to implement in Drupal, but not impossible.

Mining your folders to learn more about expertise

/ minikahlon

From Bill at Indiana, an article in Technology Review on mining folders in your computer to track what you really do. This and similar efforts mining email always makes me nervous.

The article’s a summary of a human computer interaction conference session.

But mostly it reminded me that I’ve been dissapointed by the quality of information – the depth and, dare I say it ‘expertise’ – revealed in Tech Review articles. I think I cancelled the office subscription, but am open to alternatives…