On 24 January 2012 16:25, Guo Xu <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > I have been working on visualizing the networks of academic publishing > in economics. Here's an example for the Quarterly Journal of > Economics: > > http://www.guoxu.org/econmap/map.html
Very cool. > A link indicates that two economists have published together in the > QJE. The strength of a link is defined by how many times they have > published together. > > The size of the node indicates how many times an author has published > in the QJE. Bigger nodes have published more often. > > Finally, the color indicates the ranking of the economist's alma > mater. Blue indicates that the author obtained his/her PhD from a top > 10 university (according to > http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/social-sciences/economics); > orange indicates a top 11-20 university; green is for top 21-30 and > red is for all universities beyond top 30. Could you post the underlying dataset (or at least info about it) on the DataHub? > Couple of interesting points: > > - It seems that the core (those at the centre) are almost all made up > by top 10 authors. They tend to be well-connected. > > - The hubs are: Phillipe Aghion, Daron Acemoglu, Marianne Bertrand > > - There are rarely authors beyond the top 30 who get published in the QJE. > > The visualization is done with D3. But it is very slow on older > computers. Does anyone have ideas for optimizing this? There isn't much you can optimize because graph layout is in d3. Question is: Do you need dynamic, force-directed js viz? If not you can move to static (will be faster to render and you can do more complex stuff). I'd suggest using networkx (it's what I used for visualizing patent and paper networks in the past). Alternatively worth looking at gephi. > Also, I have a lot more characteristics lying around that can be > displayed (e.g. gender - btw only 10% of the authors are female), but > I do not really know how to do it dynamically. > > Finally, I would ideally like to do the same visualization for the > *entire* network of economist. I have a 300 MB dataset scraped from > Repec that gives me information on co-authoring for virtually all > economics journals and working paper series. But obviously this will > be too slow to visualize so it would be great if someone had > experience in working with such big datasets (the whole dataset has > ~30.000 economists, which results in a 30.000 x 30.000 data matrix!!) I actually have fairly extensive experience (though now 2y out of date): <http://rufuspollock.org/2009/10/15/exploring-patterns-of-knowledge-production-2/> > Anyway, let me know what you think and looking forward to suggestions! Perhaps we can catch up at the Economics Hackday on Saturday [1]. Rufus [1]: http://blog.okfn.org/2012/01/18/open-economics-hack-day-saturday-january-28th-2012/ _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
