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109 lines
8.3 KiB
Plaintext
109 lines
8.3 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1816
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Title: HPR1816: Visualising HPR tags
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1816/hpr1816.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:39:21
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---
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This in HPR episode 1,816 entitled Visualizing HPR Tab.
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It is hosted by Dave Morris and in about 9 minutes long.
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The summary is using Bluff Vista Visualizing Tab on HPR episodes.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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That's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Hello everyone, this is Dave Morris.
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Today I'm going to do a different type of show from the way I normally do things.
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Content might be a bit different, certainly the way I do it is a bit different.
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I'm just trying to do this in a pretty much off the cuffway.
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I thought I'd share with you a thing I've been playing around with.
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I came up with the idea yesterday and put together some software to make my idea real.
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The idea is based around the HPR database.
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In the database there is an entry per show, not too surprisingly.
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And in this entry, in this row in the database,
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one of the things that's stored there is a list of tags.
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You'll be aware hopefully that you are asked to provide some tags when you submit a show these days.
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I think this is a relatively recent invention. Ken would would remind me but I haven't asked him
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within the past year or so the tags came along.
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We're not doing much with them at the moment but we're thinking of
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using them to give more information about shows in general.
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Anyway, there's this list of tags and I was looking at them.
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We really need to populate them and that means we could do with crowd sourcing
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this amongst the HPR community asking people to look at, select a show, look at it,
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or listen to it more at the point and come back with a set of tags which we can then add to the
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database. One of the things about adding tags though is quite useful to know what tags exist.
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We need to do some sort of standardization anyway.
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So I thought what I would do is try and analyse what we have at the moment with the view to just
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get my head around what we could do in the future.
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So what I thought I'd do would be to make a graphical representation of the tags
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in the shows that have tags at the moment which is not very many.
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Back in the day when I was at work I used to mess around with the package called
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GraphViz. There'll be a link in the show notes to this. It's still going strong.
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In fact it's developing, it has developed quite a lot from the way I knew it.
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GraphViz is a package which lets you define items, whatever they are,
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nodes in the parlance which are words or structures or whatever.
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And then join them together in various ways. So you define
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here's a node, here's its name, here's what I'd like you to label it.
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Various things about its colour and how you want it drawn and things like that.
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And then you then say I want to create an edge.
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An edge is the line between one node and another.
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So the way I decided to do this was to write a purl script. Of course in purl there's
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an interface to this GraphViz package. And what I'm actually doing is I'm going through
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the database, finding all records which contain tags.
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And then I'm returning the show number, the title of the show and the list of tags.
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Then in my script, the script will be available in the show notes.
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In the script I'm parsing out the tag list, separating them out by commas.
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And I'm building a structure where it's indexed by tag and attached to each tag,
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the list of all the shows that have that tag. So having built this structure which is meant
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to represent the sort of picture I want and then using GraphViz to simply walk through this
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thing through the tags in a sorted order. I don't think it actually matters because GraphViz has
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a bit of a mind of its own. I'm walking through the tags anyway and for each tag I create a node
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with a label of the tag. So you'll see this in the notes as to how this turns out. And then I'm
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walking through the list of IDs associated with that tag and making nodes from them. Each
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ID I'm turning it into the string HPR followed by a four digit number, then the title of the show
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on a new line. And it's in a box with a green border. And then I'm doing an ad edge,
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is the call you need to do to make a link between the tag box, it's actually an oval in the current
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iteration, and the show number, show name, show title box. And once that's all been done and there's
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something like, check my list, we've got 727 tags and 303 shows with those tags. So that's pretty
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small number in comparison to the number of shows, which is in the 1800s now as you probably know.
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Then I run the graphical, the GraphViz application to make it produce the output. What it does
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is it's creating an SPG file which you can then look at in a browser. And I'm putting this in my show
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notes so that you can gaze at this. It's pretty big and it's not anything very beautiful,
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but it is interesting, very least anyway, I find it interesting. You might too as well. So
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just looking at it at the moment and how it's laid out, I've made it do the tags in red ovals
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on the left and the show details on the right in green boxes as I said. And then there are arrows.
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So for example, at the top of the display at the moment, I've got teachers as a tag and tutorials
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as a tag. And they're pointing at show 1735, which is in type of free tutorials for teachers.
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So that's actually quite simple. It's only got two tags. If you scroll further down and it's a long
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scroll to get to the end of it, you start to see things like, well, if you look for the word
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Linux, and there's no way of searching in this, but it's more of an exercise in showing what's
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in there, I think. I'm not sure this would ever be a practical thing. This isn't the way to
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produce tag clouds and I don't think, but I thought it was an amazing thing. I thought you might
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be interested in it. Let's find one. See, I've got HPR Live as a tag and it's pointing at shows 1411
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and 1413, which are Omrup Live shows that need ODE, if I remember rightly. So I hope that if you
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looked at this, and I look at this, this one, I'm going to do a show, this one, particularly,
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there'll be a bit more of a clue as to what sort of tags are out there and what people are doing
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and doing with them. And I hoped it might generate a bit of discussion about using tags and get people
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enthusiastic about adding something to shows. So as you scroll way down this list and you start to
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find that things get pretty tangled. And I'm not quite sure how it's all ordered these. It's
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graph is made its own decision about how this is to be done, but you start to find that the
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plate of spaghetti problem starts to manifest big time. And so, for example, if you find
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Android, I think there's only about three links from Android to stuff, but the way the thing is
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optimised it, you can't actually follow the lines from that at all. And if you find Linux,
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a lot of shows been tagged with Linux, then it's just ridiculous. It just goes into a revolting
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tangle. Now, if I understood graph is better, then there might be ways in which I could optimise
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this. I've been fiddling around with the attributes and there's a new enormous number of them.
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Not too any great success to be honest with you, but it's something I'm going to mess around with
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a bit longer, just from my own amusement more than anything else. So, right. So the show notes
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will contain the script, which is not very big. It's only 200 lines long and it will contain
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a bunch of links to things to do with graph is and it's going to, you should be able to find the
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the latest SVG image from my experimentation. So, let me find that. It's interesting. Okay, bye.
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You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at Hecker Public Radio. We are a community podcast
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network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows,
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was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
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then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hecker Public Radio was
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founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicum computer club and it's part of the binary
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revolution at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly,
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leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status,
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today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareLite, 3.0 license.
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