Protocol

Introduction

The first step in studying the debate on Net Netruality in the USA is to understand its focus point. At the very beginning we needed to understand and, in some way, to demonstrate that there is a debate going on. We firstly started reading articles and news about it and then we analized the Wikipedia history of Net Neutrality page. But we used Wikipedia database not only to verify a debate, the online enciclopedia has been the real starting point of our research, because it offered us a specific enviroment to study our issue.

Wikipedia speaks out loud protocol

The starting point of this visualization is the Net Neutrality wikipedia page, and more precisly its history. Thanks to Kimono (Chrome extension) we were able to take all this data and to clean it in TextWrangler and Excel, obtaining the dates of the edits and the page weight changes.

In between ethical and technical protocol

We first chose five critical Wikipedia links ( Net Neutrality, Communication Act of 1934, Federal Communication Commission, Series of tubes, Verizon Communication Inc. vs Federal Communications Commission).

With an online URL extractor we obtained the URLs of all the See Also pages connected to the five links listed above. Starting from this list of URLs we used See Alsology tool to repeat the same steps 3 more times obtaining a data table showing the source and the target for each link.

Once we obtained the data we opened it in Gephi and we cleaned it deleting all "false" links and nodes with a degree equal to 0 or 1. Once we had the final data we had to elaborate the graph in order to make it easily readable. Since the most important operation is the distribution of nodes in space we worked on the spatialization with Gephi algorithm ForceAtlas 2 (Linlog mode, scaling 0.35, gravity 0.2, prevent overlap). We then create a hierarchy based on the inDegree value changing the dimension of the node (min.5 - max.50). The final step consists in colouring the nodes depending on the content of the page.