Mastodawn

Yes this is getting repetitive, but I have an abnormally high tolerance for boredom! 🤣 So here is Wednesday Jan 25 hashtag word cloud from hashtags.fyi/ from a few minutes ago!

Waterfall Wednesday is right up there after Ivory, but Meermittwoch and Whiskers Wednesday are strong contenders for Wednesday themes. Introductions are going strong (hello!!), and Microsoft's problems were getting some traction too. Covid 19 is an active topic, as is Ukraine and climate crisis. But the photography and art topics are all over the place! 😁

hashtags.fyi

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 25, 2023

@chiasm@venera.social

Any chance of posting an animation of these? 😊

chiasm Jan 25, 2023

@teledyn @chiasm@venera.social urm. animated to do what?? what are you thinking of?

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

To see the usage changes over time?

@chiasm@venera.social

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

It posts the counts every 15 min? Does that page have a json version?

#hmm
@chiasm@venera.social

Chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm @teledyn no idea but someone could scrape it I'm sure...

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm@venera.social

If BeautifulSoup did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
😊

chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@teledyn @chiasm@venera.social what would be super cool would be to scrape it every 15 to 20 minutes and get the tracings of a hashtag growing and waning in popularity over time. Somebody with more chops and I have could probably do that quickly!

chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@teledyn @chiasm@venera.social

Well I put all the #hashtag pngs I have over the past few weeks into gimp and made an animated gif but I don't think it's that informative, sadly. I think I'd have to add titles to show the dates; and assign some of the main tags a fixed spot in the cloud, maybe...?

silverwizard Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm @chiasm @teledyn It would probably mean aggregating all the tags, and change their relative size based on the day.

which seems like real work.

Chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm @teledyn @silverwizard Oh now wait a minute, I could do THAT! Thanks for the idea!! well, or maybe not, but I can at least give it a go...

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

I kinda like it this way, a definite psychedelic vibe 😊

But perhaps mapping terms to polar coordinates, then use the text's size to repel neighbours so a growing trend pushes its way through?

@chiasm@venera.social

chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@teledyn @chiasm@venera.social Glad you like it! I think your suggestion would work--it should be possible, particularly for someone who is used to working with some of those bouncy graphs like a concept map. But I'm a neuroscientist, not a data visualization specialist, Jim! 🤣

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

Ok… so… we take a few pigeons, and like those experiments at Queen's, we strap them in a little chair with those little pigeon-sized VR goggles, and we project the bouncy graph at them, if the flight muscles tense we throw a Trending alert, but also see if pigeons just don't care what's trending…

I'm sure we can get a grant!

@chiasm@venera.social

chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@teledyn @chiasm@venera.social 🤣 🤣 That just might work...

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm
@chiasm@venera.social

Chiasm Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm @teledyn well THAT sent me down a rabbit hole--but it should be possible! It's a common enough problem (ish)... (not exactly)..

spatialanalysis.github.io/lab_…

Distance-Based Spatial Weights

teledyn 𓂀 Jan 26, 2023

@chiasm@venera.social

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we THOUGHT they were easy."