Monthly Archives: September 2013
This should probably go into a funstuff section somewhere, but I used some moments of free time today to upload a script I have written some time ago to github. It’s a very simple piece of code that grabs images tagged with a specified word and, by looking at which tags appear together, creates a co-tag graph file in .gdf format. You can get it from here or run it here. To test how it scales – and to finally know what teens (apparently tumblr’s main audience) dream of – I tried it with 500 sets of 20 images for the tag “dream”. This leads to some 7K distinct tags and after some filtering, that’s what comes out (click image for lager view):
Node size is occurrence count and color (blue => yellow => red) is betweenness centrality. Apparently, love is still a thing out there. Nice.
This may become an actual tool further down the road, but maybe it’s already useful to somebody as is.
EDIT: Try it out here: https://lab.digitalmethods.net/~brieder/tumblr/tagnet/
“Of course, in the study of such complicated phenomena as occur in biology and sociology, the mathematical method cannot play the same role as, let us say, in physics. In all cases, but especially where the phenomena are most complicated, we must bear in mind, if we are not to lose our way in meaningless play with formulas, that the application of mathematics is significant only if the concrete phenomena have already been made the subject of a profound theory.“
A. D. Aleksandrov, A General View of Mathematics. In: A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev, Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning. Moscow 1956 (trans. 1964)