Darn! I skipped a week of blogging for the first time. I don’t suppose it will be the last. It’s not so much that I did no work, but that I did too much.
I made a leap forward with the network graphing, although it was a frustrating process. I was feeling that I had exhausted the possibilities of Cytoscape, but I wasn’t making much headway with Neo4j. Eventually, an application called Graphileon unblocked me. It lets me create graphs visually rather than programatically, as Cytoscape did, but with the added functionality that comes with Neo4j. Specifically, it makes it easy for me to add annotations to the nodes (texts) and relationships (connections between texts or between texts and keywords). It isn’t everything I need to do, but it’s operational, so I’m treading water again for now. Below is the Neo4j Browser visualisation. It’s soooo pretty!! And in d3 so it has floating nodes which are fun to play with. I have to admit, on my first contact with d3, I assumed it had been written by people who thought like cats, because it has that kind of irresistible quality where you just have to prod it. After a little more experience, I realised the feature has its uses.
I have also been trying to develop a proper reading program (or how can I have anything to go in the graph?) and soon discovered the limitations of that, given the time available. I am quite badly swamped in the MPhil seminar readings, not all of which are terribly useful. As ever, there is a very large amount of non-PhD stuff going on as well. Frankly, the ideal situation for me would be to put all PhD work on the slow burner until February then do a couple of months full-time work on it. However, that is not how PhD programmes are set up to work.