Using
Gephi to create a network of subjects, which were exposed to users who used
the OPAC of the Peace Palace Library during the month of December, 2015, I am
able to observe clusters of related subjects. In the upper level of this
network I see one huge cluster with the subject “Human rights” more or less in
the center of this cluster. Zooming in on this cluster enables me to weed out
the subjects which are not strongly related to “Human rights”. After several
zooming in sessions, one smaller cluster with “Human Rights” in the center
remains. Gephi no longer distinguishes
subsections anymore. So the resulting table below contains a set of more strongly
related subjects, centered around the main subject “Human rights” in December
2015.
slope
|
Label
|
-1.385
|
Human rights
|
-0.1599
|
Freedom of expression
|
-0.0741
|
Civil society
|
-0.0678
|
Human dignity
|
-0.0203
|
Oceania
|
-0.0171
|
Thailand
|
-0.0106
|
World Bank Group
|
-0.0102
|
Regional instruments
|
-0.0066
|
Blasphemy
|
-0.0036
|
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 10 December 1948)
|
-0.0033
|
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
|
-0.0025
|
Human rights commissions
|
-0.0015
|
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination (New York, 7 March 1966)
|
-0.0012
|
Criminalization
|
-0.0009
|
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
|
+0.2683
|
International instruments
|
+0.1403
|
Obligations of the state
|
+0.1362
|
Education
|
+0.1334
|
Civil and political rights
|
+0.0489
|
International law and domestic law
|
+0.045
|
Human Rights Committee
|
+0.0413
|
Legal remedies
|
+0.0409
|
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (New York, 16
December 1966)
|
+0.0202
|
Freedom of information
|
+0.0173
|
Hate speech
|
+0.0129
|
Reporting
|
+0.0078
|
Accountability
|
+0.0076
|
Committees
|
+0.0036
|
United Nations Human Rights Council
|
+0.0023
|
Treaty bodies
|
+0.0004
|
Freedom to provide education
|
How
about the use of this set of interrelated subjects in other months of 2015? Is
it possible to determine a trend during
the whole year 2015? In order to investigate this, I collected a lot of
data which have to do with subjects. Every month of the year 2015 I collected
all subjects exposed to our users of our OPAC and then let Gephi calculate several
values related to each subject in these monthly networks. All these different values
I stored in a database, but in the following I am just interested in the
so-called betweenness centrality value. This value stands for, and I quote : “In brief,betweenness centrality is an indicator value for a key
position. The higher the value the more important the role of the keyword. This
value is calculated by counting the shortest paths between two keywords in
our network. The keyword which appears the most times as being in between two
different keywords, has the highest betweenness centrality value; these keywords are brokers or
intermediaries.” [http://pushaqa.blogspot.nl/2014/11/just-below-surface.html]
So it is
possible to measure the popularity of certain subject areas by using the
'weight' of these subject areas in the bigger picture of monthly subject
networks. This means I used the values calculated in relation to the complete sets of subjects, not just te values of the subset. I then calculate the trendline of these weigths. The slope of the trendline indicates an
increase (positive slope) or a decrease (negative slope) in popularity. In the
table of subjects above, I also mentioned the slope in accordance to each
subject. A division in popularity is shown; there are subjects with a
decreasing popularity like “Human rights” itself, or “Freedom of expression”.
Increasing popularity can be observed in “International instruments” and “Obligations
of the state”. If I take the complete set of subjects in consideration there is an average of -0.027, so a very slight decrease of interest in ‘Human rights
and related subjects”.
There is a increase in interest if I do the same exercise with "Law of the sea": on average 0.142.
It is my belief that knowledge about the development of interest in a particular subject, can help libraries to create better services for its users.
Dit werk valt onder een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding-NietCommercieel-GeenAfgeleideWerken 4.0 Internationaal-licentie.
