About

Ekisto is an interactive visualization of three online communities: StackOverflow, Github and Friendfeed. Ekisto tries to imagine and map our online habitats using graph algorithms and the city as a metaphor. Ekisto comes from ekistics, the science of human settlements.

A graph layout algorithm arranges users in 2D space based on their similarity. Cosine similarity is computed based on the tags of posts contributed by users (StackOverflow), collaborate, belong, watch, fork and follow relationships (Github), or based on the followers/following links between users and groups (Friendfeed). The volume of each user represents the normalized value of the user's Pagerank (Github, Friendfeed) or their reputation points (StackOverflow).

Read more about the motivation and design behind Ekisto on my blog.

December 10, 2013 update: newer map and features in the works.

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A project by Alex Dragulescu.

Published on December 1, 2013.
Acknowledgments.

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Help

Click-and-drag to pan the map around. Click to zoom in or use the mouse-wheel to zoom in or out. Use the tool palette on the left to explore the visualization:

• » Click to see more detail.
• » Click to see less detail.
• » Click to fit the whole map in the viewport.
• » Click to go to a random point in the map.
• » Switch the cursor to query mode. Click on the image to find out the nearest user(s) next to the coordinate of the click.
• » Load the top users according to the PageRank algorithm (Github, Friendfeed) or reputation points (StackOverflow).
• » Clear all information overlays from the image.
• Search box » Enter a username and press the <Enter> key to find a user on the map. Only users that were public at the date of the crawl, and are part of the largest connected component of the network will be shown.

  Note: It is possible for users to have the wrong icon rendered in the static image. Github for example allows users to change usernames and the data is from 2012. The icon in the overlay is what is current now on the website.

• Filter by rank » Move the handles of the range slider, or use the input boxes to filter the visibility of the information overlays.

Watch the bottom status bar for messages about your actions.