Topic Emphasis By Author in the Boing Boing Weblog

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2006

From my last post we have a pretty good high-level picture of the topics covered overall by the Boing Boing weblog. What about the individual authors ? Which topics do they write more about ? Look at the figure below. It shows the breakdown by author for the 50 most popular 3rd level topics. The 3rd level topics are the most specific ones defined in my simple topic hierarchy.

This is interesting but much of the detail for Mark and David is hidden because of their relatively lower output compared to Cory & Xeni. We can do much better by scaling each column of bars independently so that they show the relative emphasis on that topic for each author. We can also use colour to highlight topics where the author writes a higher (green) or lower (red) proportion of their posts.

This chart illustrates lots of interesting information some of which was already shown in earlier posts. Some of the points of interest we can glean from this one chart are:

  • Cory has a higher proportion of his posts than the others on Intellectual Property, Computer Games, Software, and Literature.
  • Xeni has a higher proportion of her posts than the others on Television, Photography, Government, and Military.
  • Mark has a higher proportion of his posts than the others on Comics, Drawing, Basketball, Pets, Animation, and Painting.
  • David has a higher proportion of his posts than the others on Visual Arts(General), Natural Science, Industrial Engineering, Pets, Biology, Medicine, and Psychology.

Related Links:

Boing Boing Analysis - Part 1 (Posts Over Time by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 2 (Posts Breakdown over Day of Week)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 3 (Images/Post over time by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 4 (Outbound Links/Post and Acronym use by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 5 (Topic Hierarchy)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 6 (Topic Emphasis by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 7 (Images/Post for Topics and Topic Share over Time)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 8 (Incoming Links)

 


Boing Boing Analysis - Part 5
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Boing Boing Analysis - Part 7