Tag Clouds on Steriods: New Techniques for Visualising Social and Mass Media Big Data [video]

Screenshot from Deb Roy's TED Talk: Birth of a Word

I love me a Wordle. If you're the same and you're interested in some ground-breaking techniques to visualise big data in real-time this video is worth a watch.

Deb Roy's research starts with an experiment to parse 90,000 hours of video to chart his infant son's discovery of language through to analysis of online comments, sentiment and social connections during President Obama's State of the Union address.

His techniques using different planes to represent mass media, social media and the links between make the connectors within the social graph light up. If you're pushed for time, the relevant digital media bit kicks off around 11:47.

It's definitely worth a watch, especially if you're using or building tools to visualise large complex sets of information. I'd love to see how this applies outside of the home to mobile Internet usage, commeting and interactions with social graph.

Screenshot (c) TED Conferences LLC.

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <p> <br>
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • HTML tags will be transformed to conform to HTML standards.
  • Each email address will be obfuscated in a human readable fashion or (if JavaScript is enabled) replaced with a spamproof clickable link.

More information about formatting options

Type the characters you see in this picture. (verify using audio)
Type the characters you see in the picture above; if you can't read them, submit the form and a new image will be generated. Not case sensitive.