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.