UK Brand Tags

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a tagging project called brandtags, whilst I liked the concept I really wanted to see more British brands in there.  Seems like lots of other people did too as I received an email this morning saying that a UK version had been created.  And so has an Hispanic version too.

So I gave the UK one a go, it is more enjoyable to use with UK brands as I have more of an opinion on them.  But not many people have used it as yet so it is not as entertaining to go look at the data, at the moment.  Lets hope it catches on, it will be interesting to see what British opinion is of certain brands/companies.

ITV for example, there are a lot of good tags to describe them…

PhD Proposal

I seem to have spent the last 6 months writing proposals. In reality I have spent 6 months attempting to write them and procrastinating and putting it off until the critical moment when I have to get it finished. Some of the more productive procrastination I’ve done is a lot of literature searches and reading. Which whilst very constructive, I now have too many ideas I want to pursue and absolutely no idea how or what to focus on.

Also in the 6 months I had attempted to write a research paper of my VideoTag project, it’s still not finished (this is a worrying trend for the next 3 years!). Point being, that I realised while writing it that I never had a clear aim at the start of my MSc project, I simply had loads of ideas for investigations that could loosely be classed as objectives. I also struggled working out what my method was, I know what I did, but why did I choose to do things one way and not another?

So now as I find myself again writing a proposal (I thought this was over for a few months now I have a place!) I’m aware that I need to have a specific aim and explicit objectives, and set out a clear method of experiments that will hopefully achieve my aim. And all I have is what I had throughout my MSc, a page long list of research questions and ideas for lots of little experiments and potential tag analysis strategies, within the umbrella of a tagging system development. So I need to establish what I will achieve by answering these research questions. What purpose my tagging system will have that contributes something to what already exists. How do I turn a page of questions into a two sentence statement of a clear and focussed aim?

As always it seems recently I have about 2 weeks to make these decisions, before my self imposed deadline because I (maybe foolishly) want to get started as soon as I can.

Tag Galaxy

I came across this tagging visualisation project Tag Galaxy on the flowingdata blog. It is the 2008 thesis project of Steven Wood. I love this idea and have really enjoyed playing about with it. You enter a tag, I started with beach (i’m not at all completely focussed on my upcoming holiday), then you are presented with a solar system, with your tag being the sun, and co-occurring tags represented by planets orbiting the main tag sun. Clicking on a planet (related tag) gives a new visualisation this time for a refined search with the two tags. The more tags assigned to the central sun, the more specific the search results. This is an excellent feature as it utilises the capability of filtering results and finding a photo that accurately matches what you want to see. Here is a visualisation I created from the tag beach.

Clicking on the sun takes you to a new visualisation showing images tagged with your tag combination.

Then if you click on an image it enlarges the image and provides a link to the flickr profile.

The planets appear to be clustered but I’m not sure by what metric, at first look it seems by semantics, but either it isn’t accurate, or distribution is random. Another subtle aspect that is more apparent when looking at a solar system for a sun of multiple tags is that the planets’ sizes vary depending on the amount of photos labelled with that tag. I think an improvement would be to exaggerate this feature slightly so it was more obvious on single tag visualisations.

It has a nice touch of being able to be full screen too, a useful feature when zooming in and out of your solar system and making it spin around – which provides hours of fun on its own!