Infographic Yourself (or any topic)

They’re one of the hottest things on the internet right now.  Graphical representations of a topic to offer a visual look and usually deeper insight to a particular topic.  In a short viewing, you can see an overview of a topic, relationships, and usually inspiration to read more and dig deeper into the topic.

A few Fridays ago, I made my first attempt to create one of these things.  I called it simply “Ontario Educators”.  Pretty primitive, I must admit.

I still like the concept, despite my limited artist abilities. Here’s an interesting approach if you’re looking for a way to analyse Twitter information. It comes from a website called “The Archivist”.  There is a Windows application that permits a Twitter search on a topic that you can download in Excel format and then work your magic with the data.  Or, if you’re just looking for some quick data, check out the web version and let the website do the analysis and visualization for you.

You can send a Twitter message from your account at this time, if you must.  The link takes peoplere here.  Once you generate the big graphic, each of the smaller graphics serve as buttons to display more information.

The real fun comes in the analysis though.  In this case, I did a search for myself and got the results from some recent activity.  The results aren’t necessarily “from” me or “to” me, but rather analyse Twitter messages where the term “dougpete” appears.  Some of the messages are automatically generated – blog post announcements, paper.li, etc.

	Looks like there’s a dip in activity on October 16.  Wait.  That’s today and I just woke up.  It’s bound to get more verbose!
	It makes sense that my name is the number one username.  Alltop_Edu rebroadcasts my blog announcements so I’ll ignore that as well.  Looks like friends Cyndie and Alana are great conversationalists!
	I like this analysis.  I think that originating messages is the most important thing that can be done by a community members.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to retweet or be retweeted.
	The danger of automatic posters is that they’re so regular that they can outweigh one’s regular content.  If I was analyzing this using the offline tool, I’d filter these terms and get to the real content.
	At this point, the sites that are shortened provide very little useful information.  The site acknowledges this and the fact that sometimes these go to the wrong place.  But, I’m betting that the FourSquare link has coffee at the end of it.
	I find this very insightful.  My primary browser is Seesmic Desktop for computer and Twittelator for portable.  Dlvr.it and Paper.li are services that post automatically for me.  Apparently, Tweetdeck is the browser of choice for others.

Some of the information is predictable but the rest I find to be very interesting.  I like the concept of downloading the data in Excel format where you can use analytical tools like Excel, LibreOffice, or Fathom to dig into the data in your own terms.  I also like the concept of using the information as real time search results.  I do see infographics as being a powerful and useful result from the research process and looking for great tools to facilitate their construction and data analysis remains a goal.

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