Visit the Blog Forum
Web graph researcher Kenneth Farrall maintains an open blog for discussing issues related to methodology and theory. Please join us in the forum for a general discussion of web graph research and more specific individual topics.
The Web Graph Sociology Research Initiative is a joint project co-developed by Annenberg Dean Michael X. Delli Carpini and Ph.D. student Kenneth Neil Farrall. The site is dedicated to exploring and developing theory, research methodology, data analysis and visualization techniques for studying the sociology of the World Wide Web via the "web graph," the set of nodes and edges in the directed graph defined by the individual web pages of the World Wide Web (nodes) and their hyperlinks (edges.)
Papers
Selected papers are available in the right-hand column of this page, below web graph results.
Data Gathering and Visualization Tool
The primary tool for this research is the Issue Crawler, a server-based software tool, developed by the Govcom.org foundation in Amsterdam, Holland. If you have a user account to make use of the crawler and are just beginning to use this tool, visit the how-to page for detailed crawling instructions. You can get an account by visiting http://www.issuecrawler.net.
Research Data
Please visit the research section for results of recent crawls.
View the Web Graph Gallery
Visiting the web graph gallery is a good way to familiarize yourself with the nature of web graphs without having to delve deeply into theoretical literature or follow detailed analytical arguments. It's a quick way to see the variation and web graph patterns and think in new ways about the meanings they may encode. The gallery presents graph images with a minimum of additional data. The general topic being graphed, basic crawl parameters, and crawl date are generally provided. Images are presented in basic JPG format, as compared to the SVG interactive formats provided in the research section.
