| |
1. Getting started with Guess
(visual exploration)
Download the file poliblogs.gdf from cTools. It represents the citation patterns between 40 A list blogs during a couple of months preceding the 2004 presidential election, along with the political leaning of those blogs. Open it in Guess (one way of doing this is by clicking the "Load GDF/GraphML" button after guess starts up). Do the following (submit just the final image and the list of commands you used).
- Lay the network out using your layout algorithm of choice. Follow up with the center and rescaleLayout() commands, to adjust the position of the network and the size of the vertices.
- Play with the zoomable interface and figure out how to reposition the nodes.
- Use the information window to find out what attributes of nodes and edges are specified.
- Color the conservative blogs red and the liberal ones blue. Color the edges differently depending on the leaning of the from and to nodes.
- Compute the indegree for all nodes at once (no need to turn in) and resize the nodes according to indegree using the resizeLinear(indegree,minsize,maxsize) command, where you specify minsize and maxsize.
- Change the width of the edges to reflect the number of citations (given with the 'weight' attribute) using the resizeLinear() command.
- Make a couple of observations about the blog network and discuss whether modifying the visualization with the above steps helped you make them.
- Save the commands in a .py file, and turn in along with your exported image (jpg, eps, etc.).
To repeat the process, you would only need to call execfile("yourfilename.py"), or select File>Run Script in the dropdown menu. To save your network with the new colors & positions, you could use the exportGDF(“filename.gdf”) command. You could also have created a persistent database when starting Guess. |
