Shakmatt

1 About me
2 Lostpedia Research and Visualizations
- 2.1 Lost Main Character Connections for Selected Season 6 Episodes

About meEdit

My name is Derek Hansen. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI). I study online communities and social media technologies. With collaborators from the Human Computer Interaction Lab I am currently working on using NodeXL to visualize social media networks. NodeXL is a plugin for Excel 2007 (and 2010) that lets you import data from social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr and create network visualizations and perform network analysis.

I'm here because I'm a huge Lost fan and I'm also a huge fan of the Lostpedia community, which I see as an excellent example of large-scale collaborative sensemaking.

Lostpedia Research and VisualizationsEdit

Several graduate students and I are working to better understand the Lostpedia community. We are also interested in exploring with you all how network visualizations can inform the Lostpedia community. We will be posting several visualizations throughout the season and want to encourage you to post your reactions to them on my user Talk page (Did you learn anything new from them? What do you like about them? What don't you like about them? How could they be improved? What network visualizations should we create next that don't yet exist?). Make sure and tell others about these and encourage them to provide feedback. The more feedback and ideas we get, the better visualizations we'll be able to create! I'm also happy to help any community members create their own visualizations in NodeXL if you are interested. Below are a few visualizations to get things started...

Lost Main Character Connections for Selected Season 6 Episodes Edit

The following 3 images show connections between main characters in LOST for the first 3 episodes of Season 6, as determined by edits made by YOU the LOSTpedia community to the character pages. They were created by Master's of Information Management students in Dr. Hansen's Users and Use Context class which looks at the experiences of users in using technology such as Lostpedia and NodeXL.

We looked at which character pages were edited by the same person during a 48-hour time frame following the airing of a particular episode to create a line (i.e., Edge) between those characters in the network visualization (i.e., network graph). If many people edited two character pages then the line connecting them is thicker than if only a couple of people edited both pages. For example, in the LA X Part 1&2 visualization, many people edited both Jack Shepard's page and John Locke's page, which created a thick line connecting them. In contrast, few people edited both James Sawyer Ford's page and John Locke's page, so there is a thin line connecting them. Also, the overall size of a character's image reflects total page edits by all users during the same 48-hour window.

We hope that you enjoy these visualizations, and perhaps they will help you see LOST, or LOSTpedia in a new light. The student group would love collect your thoughts on these visualizations and other ideas for improvements in their brief online survey -- your opinions will be of great assistance! You can also leave comments on Dr. Hansen's Talk page