A bit chunk of HotStuff is down at the moment due to server maintenance. Hopefully everything will be up and running within the next 24 hours.
News
I’m in the middle of moving all of the “daveyp.com” site to a new web hosting company, so things may break or get a little funky for a few days — bear with me! 
I’ve finally gotten around to adding a Google Map of the most recent blog posts to the site.
It’s not 100% accurate, as the same place name can exist in many countries (e.g. there’s a “Birmingham” in the UK and at least seven others in the US).
(“Old Globe” by ToastyKen)
With many thanks to Marlene Delhaye, stopwords have now been added for French, German, Danish and Dutch.
It will take a little while to rebuild all of the word clouds, but everything should be done before the end of today
(Bibliothèque Nationale de France by Gilzee – Wikipedia)
(Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin by Sugu – Wikipedia)
(Det Kongelige Bibliotek by John & Mel Kots – Wikipedia)
(Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam by wwwleraar – Wikipedia)
For those not familiar with CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), it’s the “leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers” in the UK.
A couple of months ago, Phil Bradley posted a response (“CILIP – Epic FAIL“) to CILIP exec Bob McKee’s post “All of a twitter“…
Bob: “There’s some twittering at present about whether CILIP has (or should have) any “official” presence on various lists or micro blog sites … the simple answer, of course, is no.”
Phil: “I appreciate that it’s not easy to choose which emerging technologies or resources to use, but Twitter is pretty widely reported these days, hundreds of librarians and libraries are using it, CILIP groups are active on it, so why ‘of course’?”
Although that might make some of you think this was another “GormanGate“, Bob’s definitely not a soapbox ranting technology luddite flailing his arms at imaginary straw men 
No surprise that UK librar* bloggers rolled up their sleeves and started blogging!
Fast forward a few weeks and there was an event (held on Wednesday afternoon) widely dubbed as “CILIP 2.0″ — both Phil and Brian Kelly (UKOLN) were invited to speak about the issues surrounding 2.0 technologies, libraries, and CILIP. To get a feel for the event, CILIP Update live blogged everything.
As it looked like Twitter would be heavily used for the event (the event hashtag did indeed trend), over my lunch break I hastily cobbled together a Perl script to capture the #cilip2 Twitter hashtag tweets, as Twitter doesn’t keep an archive of old tweets and they disappear after a week or so.
Although I didn’t really follow the discussion live, I did manage to put the tweets together to create a transcript of the event. Being a visual person, I also dropped the tweets into Wordle…
The debate in the UK continues, which is why CILIP is currently hotter than swine flu.
For anyone who’s interested in how library/librarian blogs are reporting the swine flu news, I’ve set up a special RSS feed:
The feed searches for any of the following keywords in blog posts:
- swine, pandemic*, flu, h1n1, influenza, outbreak*, epidemic*, swineflu, and the hashtag #swineflu
In a blatent rip-off of Twitter, I’ve added “Trending Words” to the sidebar.
These are words that have been used at least twice in different blog posts from the last 24 hours and that have only ever appeared in less than 10 blog posts since this site went live in Dec 2008.
I’m going to be adding some features this week which measure the emotional content of the blogs using the “affective norms for English words” (ANEW) list. The list contains just over a thousand words, along with a measure of their “pleasure” and “arousal” values (both measured from 0 to 10). The values were derived from a series of studies carried out in the late 1990s.
As each word in the list has two values, they can be plotted on a chart. If you plot “pleasure” horizontally and “arousal” vertically, then the words that have similar values cluster together.
If you use the image below as a guide, then words which carry a negative emotion (i.e. do not generate pleasure) tend towards the left of the chart (red). The more negative the word is, the more to the left it will be. Conversely, words with a strong positive emotion tend to the right (green). Words in the middle are more neutral.
The “arousal” value measures the “strength” of the emotion. Words that evoke a stronger emotional response are further down (i.e. boxes 7, 8 & 9). Words that don’t are nearer the top (boxes 1, 2 & 3).
As you’d probably expect, boxes 1, 3 and 8 don’t contain many words. In other words, box 1 would contain strongly negative words that don’t have an emotional “punch”, and box 8 would contain words that are neutral but that evoke a strong emotional response.
To give you an idea, here are some of the words that would appear in each box:
1] negative pleasure, low arousal — bored, dreary, messy, and overcast
2] neutral pleasure, low arousal — paper, table, chin, umbrella, quiet, and nonchalant
3] positive pleasure, low arousal — relaxed, sleep, bird, secure, cozy, butterfly, and pillow
4] negative pleasure, medium arousal — funeral, sad, misery, jail, toothache, fraud, and infection
5] neutral pleasure, medium arousal — hammer, boxer, trumpet, alien, industry, and army
6] positive pleasure, medium arousal — rainbow, luxury, paradise, liberty, reward, and family
7] negative pleasure, high arousal — rape, murder, bomb, terrorist, anger, and danger
8] neutral pleasure, high arousal — lion, masturbate, alert, curious, tease, and aggressive
9] positive pleasure, high arousal — erotic, desire, rollercoaster, orgasm, miracle, joy, and kiss
When the words are plotted on the chart, you get a shape that’s not unlike a map of Australia (if you’re reading this blog post Kathryn, I hope it doesn’t make you home sick!)…
Let’s look at a couple of examples of what happens if we apply this to library blogs. First of all, the “In the Library with the Lead Pipe” blog (click for the full sized image):
There are 4 things shown on the image:
1) The overall scatter of words in the ANEW list are shown as small blue dots. This is shown simply as a guide to indicate the overall shape (as per the previous image that resembled the map of Australia).
2) The average emotional content of each blog post is shown as a small green cross. This is a calculated by looking for all occurrences of ANEW words in the blog post. The average position is then calculated. Therefore, if a blog post contained lots of strongly negative content, you would expect the green cross to be towards the bottom-left.
3) The average emotional content of all the blog posts is shown as a larger red cross. This is calculated as before, but is the average for all of the content on the blog. Therefore, if a blog contained lots of posts with strongly positive content, you would expect the red cross to be towards the bottom-right.
4) Word usage frequency is indicated by the transparent circles. This gives an indication of the type of words being used on the blog. Larger circles indicate that words with the same pleasure & arousal values have been used more frequently.
Taking all of the above into account, you can see that “In the Library with the Lead Pipe” tends not to have strongly emotional blog posts. However, where emotional words are used, they are mostly positive.
Here’s a second example, this time for the “MaisonBisson.com” blog…
Although the average emotional content (red cross) for the entire blog is similar to “In the Library…”, Casey is obviously a much more emotional blogger. The blog posts (green crosses) are scattered more widely, as is the variation in the emotional words (circles) being used. The circles towards the bottom-left indicate some strongly negative emotional content.
I wrote the code for this awhile back, but forgot to make it live — d’oh!
If you’re interested in particular words or topics, you can subscribe to an RSS feed. For example, if you’re interested in Facebook, just click on the RSS icon to subscribe to the feed for that word…
You can also construct the RSS feed URL by hand…
http://www.daveyp.com/hotstuff/rss/word
To match multiple words and generate a single RSS feed (rather than using a separate feed for each word), separate them with a comma…
http://www.daveyp.com/hotstuff/rss/primo,summon,ebscohost,encore
The items in the RSS feed will link to the original blog post. The text of the indexed version of the blog post is also included, but it will be missing punctuation, etc.
I’ve just tweaked HotStuff to tweet the current hottest word: http://twitter.com/hotstuff2
The code runs roughly every two hours and will only tweet an update if the hottest word has changed.