Description
In this visualization we talk about the evolution of the issues related to the controversy over time, spanning from 2013 until today. We searched on Wikipedia all the pages of the actors we identified at the beginning of our research, checking all their See Also entries. These entries effectively represent the various topics related to the actors, their visualization results in a network with nodes and edges, where each node is a specific page on Wikipedia and each edge is the link between two pages. We created five visualizations out of all the data we gathered. The first one shows the network dynamically changing overtime from 2013 to 2016; we spotted just the most important pages to stress the evolution of the topics around the controversy. The other four visualizations (one for each year) offer the possibility explore data in an analytical way, therefore is easy to spot all the connections between the pages. Each visualization uses a four color palette that identifies three categories: black represents the the piracy-related keywords, blue represents the publishers, green represents the open-culture related terms, and the light grey represents all the other kind of topics. In addition to that the nodes size depends on the number of pages linking that specific voice.
The visualization shows how the controversy related topics shift over time: in 2013 most of the pages regard general concepts that overtime get more and more specific. As time goes by the bigger nodes gradually break down in smaller and more specific nodes. Most of these nodes are not about general topics anymore, they’ve become definite entities—such as organizations, websites and movements. This means that there’s a rising specificity about the topics related to the controversy, which often results in the concrete realization of the starting ideals. Piracy is also a theme that receives increasing attention throughout the years: besides ‘getting more and more specific the nodes related to this theme get bigger and bigger, signifying their relevance in the controversy. By 2016 most of the voices related to this theme are about concrete projects like Sci-Hub, Libgen and #ICanHazPdf, meaning that the pirates are taking actions to foster the spreading of scientific knowledge.
