Not just one link one vote!
Creating A Massive Network Visualization Of The Global News Landscape: Who Links To Whom?
The article, Creating A Massive Network Visualization Of The Global News Landscape: Who Links To Whom? by Kalev Leetaru, discusses the GDELT project which creates a visualization of links between web pages. GDELT’s visualization helps build a greater depth in understanding of factors that drive linkages between pages. By clustering groups of web pages that have a high level of links, it becomes visually obvious that external factors such as language, geography, and trade relations drive linkage.
Our lectures in INFO 2040 discussed how the number of links to a web page assigns authority in a one link one vote kind of concept. It is apparent from Leetaru’s article that, in reality, the authority of a web page is not simply one link, one vote as we were taught in class. Leetaru in a sense expands on the concept discussed in class — ultimately, the number of links is not just based on the content alone but on other external factors.
The article provides an interesting assessment of what drives links between websites, yielding an interesting view of global communication. For instance, if we were to filter down to a specific topic (news or social) you might come up with visualization that shows which websites across the globe are communicating on that topic — allowing insight into specific social clusters interested in a particular topic.