2017

The Influence Mapping project sponsored the development of an improved, stand-alone version of Oligrapher—a social network mapping tool—to support the work of data journalists and other researchers who need to tell stories based on complex social network data. Oligrapher allows a writer to pull out and highlight key relationships within larger networks that might otherwise get lost in a full representation of the network. It also permits paginated views that allow authors to sequentially annotate and highlight different of the map.

The first version of Oligrapher was built by and closely integrated into Littlesis—an online database that maps social and political relationships in support of accountability journalism. The new version can be downloaded and installed by anyone (with a bit of technical expertise) to work on their websites and support work on their own social network analyses.

Learn more about Oligrapher

2016

The Syllabus Explorer leverages a collection of over one million syllabi collected from university and departmental websites. It provides:

The first version of a new publication metric (Teaching Rank) based on how often texts are taught.
A unique course-building tool that provides information about what’s taught with what.
A promising means of exploring the history of fields, curricular change, and differences in teaching across institutions, states, and countries.

The Syllabus Explorer publishes only metadata (citations, dates, locations, etc) extracted from its collection via machine learning techniques. It does not publish underlying documents or personally identifying information.

The Explorer is very much a work in progress. As you may discover, it gets a lot of things wrong. Fixes and improvements will be incremental. But it also gets a lot right, and makes curricula visible and navigable in ways that are valuable to authors, teachers, researchers, administrators, publishers, and students.

Available at: The Open Syllabus Explorer

Publications