Category Archives: Information Retrieval

Weeknotes: Listening to the Air Waves

This week I bit the bullet and plugged in some machines. I bought a HackRF One from Martin Lynch and Son with an ANT 500 antenna. I installed hackrf and gnuradio through Homebrew, which is not with out its perils. The gnuradio version (3.10) that is installed does not have the osmocom component so I […]

Parallel social lives?

A recent experiment, which will be discussed in due course, has taken me back to thinking about parallel computing in Python using the multiprocessing library. This also reminds me of a conversation that I had with David De Roure as we walked to a seminar after some experiments using Raspberry Pi (2 and 3) boards […]

Distant listening of Green Day

I am not sure world needs this but it exists. The YouTube video, every green day song playing at the same time, and it turns Nicholas Cook’s concept of distant listening (2013) into a reality. I am not a huge Green Day fan – some bits good, some not – and found it hard to […]

Social Reading

There is an interesting Twitter thread about the upcoming Trump / Putin summit in Helsinki. Leah McElrath has picked up one of Trump’s tweets and is using what appears to be a hybrid methodology to read it. I am still deciphering it in my head and unpicking the various parts but some of this is […]

Interlinked communities gaming the search and social

Carole Cadwalladr’s article, “Google, democracy and the truth about internet search“, published in today’s Observer New Review section is a thoughtful piece about the way that Right wing politics (under what ever banner they wear today) have used the Web to push their agenda. Her opening paragraph about typing “are jews..” returned the equally appalling […]

Reusing material on social media

A hat tip to Kirsty Rolfe for favouriting this retweet from Sjoerd Levelt: ICYMI: the lawyers kindly updated their blog after they were informed of the nature of @CathalUK‘s @MedievalReacts. pic.twitter.com/8G37iiGJr2 — Sjoerd Levelt (@SLevelt) April 10, 2015 I highly recommend going to the tweet and viewing the conversation that led to this change. The […]

Harmonising the Heterogeneous at Cultures of Knowledge

Harmonising the Heterogeneous at the Cultures of Knowledge seminar series with Eero Hyvönen. Notes are unedited. Two forms of the Web : WWW for humans, GGG (Giant Global Graph) for data. Core data set 1048 data sets and 59 billion triples. Google’s Knowledge Graph and Microsoft’s Satori – graph engines in the search giants. Why […]

A glimpse into the wormhole

The High Scalability blog posted a link to Facebook’s new posts search system and the Facebook Notes written about it by a member of the engineering team. One of the sections mentioned the Wormhole publish/subscribe system that they developed to push data across multiple data centres in near real time. At a very basic level, […]

Exploring Charles Dickens’s networks

As part of the ongoing Open Correspondence rewrite, I’ve started working on some visualisations after a conversation with Rufus Pollock during one of the Humanities calls. One of the immediate ones was a force-directed graph to link all the correspondents to the authors. Well author at the moment. Although I am aware of SigmaJS, I […]

Thinking about texts and communities at Textcamp

Having gone to Textcamp yesterday, I started playing with Wordle and IBM’s Many Eyes at the suggestion of Dave Flanders of the JISC. As James Harriman-Smith, the organiser and Open Literature co-ordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, had suggested that this year is the anniversary of the manuscript of Alexander Pope‘s An Essay in Criticism, […]