The Web Conference is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. It was started in 1994 at CERN, Switzerland, and is hosted annually at different locations around the world.
I presented my research paper InfraNodus — Generating Insight Using Text Network Analysis at the WWW’19 conference in San-Francisco, which was also published in the conference’s peer reviewed annual journal. In this research paper, I demonstrate the science behind InfraNodus — a tool that I’ve been developing during the last years.
InfraNodus represents every text as a rhizomatic network of interconnected concepts. The more those concepts are used together, the stronger patterns they form. Based on this representation we can reveal the main topical clusters and — most importantly — structural gaps in any discourse. Those structural gaps can be used to generate new ideas that will bridge the concepts from different areas in a new way.
Presenting this approach in a scientific context also makes it possible for other researchers to cite this work in their own studies. This makes it possible not only to implement the idea on a bigger scale but to also trace the different paths and threads that it creates along its development and evolution.