Over in the comments of the Dreamwidth mirror of my previous post, Elf asked whether I could redraw the graph of the ebooks discussions after removing her linkspam from the mix. Good idea!

In the end I removed several things:

• Elf’s linkspam (elf1)
• Kanata’s linkspam (kanata)
• The entire tech-blog cluster (oreilly1, booksprung1, and those linked to them)
• Any posts that linked to mitchell but weren’t otherwise connected to the graph
• Any posts which, after all that was done, were orphaned, not linking to anything else

The results were interesting:

ebooks discussion (no linkspam version) - full size SVG, PNG

So, to reiterate, this is the “interesting bits” version of the LiveJournal/Dreamwidth discussion that took up most of the previous graph. I’ve also added something new to the visualisation: posts shown as ellipses happened on LJ/DW, and those in rectangles happened on non-LJ/DW blogs. This makes it easy to see which parts of the conversation were happening where. As I did last time, any post that was crossposted to at least one of LJ or DW counted as an LJ/DW post.

Points of interest:

• In the lower left, there’s a cluster of mostly authors or others involved in the publishing industry, many of them posting on non-LJ/DW blogs.
• The centre of the graph, especially those posts linking to troisroyaumes and colorblue1, are what I would characterise as members of the social justice/fandom community.
• At the upper right, also linking to some posts shown in the lower right, you can see that there were a handful of men mostly linking to other men (jimhines et al.)

We already knew that the tech blogs were having their own discussion unconnected to the LJ/DW discussion, but now we can see that the authors/publishers were, for the most part, having a conversation disconnected from the fans. The crossover between the author and fan conversations mostly happened via Karen Healey, a young author whose first YA novel was published last year, and who moves in both circles.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the different conversations going on, and see how the actual content of them differed. Here are Wordle diagrams of the three main clusters:

Authors wordle (based on: renesears1, mitchell, healey1, jimhines1, sjaejones, pauley1, seawasp)

Social justice/fandom wordle (based on: qian1, deepad, colorblue, starlady, marina1, marina2, wistfuljane)

Tech blog wordle (based on: oreilly1, booksprung2, oleary, librarything, booki.sh, shatzkin2, wired)

It’s no real surprise to find that each of these groups was writing about different stuff, but I still find it interesting to see the words that pop out in each picture: “publishers” and “illegal” in the author wordle; “people”, “Western”, and “indigenous” in the social justice one; “piracy” and “DRM” among the tech bloggers.

Again, for reference, links to all the blog posts referenced can be found in this spreadsheet.

The More on those ebook discussions by Alex Bayley, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.