Using infovis to observe (and understand?) Italian political system

Some days ago, the guys from BlogMeter asked me to investigate some ways of understanding data they collected about the words used by people on the internet to desciribe italian politic.

Even if the data I got (in a standard graphml format) is a typical graph, using a node-edge-network representation could not be so usefull to get the full overview…having so much relations was not easy to read and could not lead user to get a proper overview.

So I started to investigate the opportunity to use some ArcCircle system representations to get the best overview (like I did one year ago to visualize links among italian Blogs).

This option was also not so usefull to understand the “mood” of the whole italian internet community, so I moved to a more classical TagCloud approach (here some screenshots) in order to improve the comprehension working on the meaning of word-sizes.

In these terms, the project is about to calibrate the size of words based on 3 parameters:
–> number of incoming links
–> number of outcoming links
–> number of incoming links + number of outcoming links

After evaluating the power of using words, I moved into the direction to add to the software some filters in order to discover:

–> the words representing a single politician

–> the words representing a group of politicians

–> the words representing a single party and/or a coalition

To do this, some more data and some more thoughts are needed.

We’ll see in next days