Description

The Seealsology map allows to see the most influent topics about ISIS on Wikipedia and therfore how the knowledge on the web about those topics is organized. In the visualization, each circle is a Wikipedia page and the connected circles are the pages that can be reached in the “See also” section of each page. What we can infer, i.e is that religion, in green, plays a big role in the debate because it occupies a large portion of the map, hence there are a lot of pages on the topic somehow related to one another, and is also well defined in a coherent cluster. Differently, other topics are not so consistent and are mixed with other categories very often. It is interesting to notice that the Wikipedia page “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” is a bridge between three main categories of religion, terrorism, and war. Based on the map, the Wikipedia page “Psychological warfare” is extremely close to the IS. With an overview, the complex structure of the map probably reflects a confused and fragmented perception of the phenomenon.

Protocol

The seeds used on Seealsology to create the map are the links contained in the abstract of the Wikipedia page “Islamic State of Iraq and Levant” plus the page itself, as of 12/06/2016. The abstract was selected as our source of links because it is the section of the page that contains the most relevant, the most influential, and the most current topics related, in this case, to ISIS. While generating the map, all the non-pertinent links were removed to produce a well connected and cohesively network. The map was then adjusted using Gephi and Illustrator in order to make it easily understandable.

Originally, a total of three maps were made. The other two used different criterias to select the seed pages: one with the pages contained in the “ISIS” category on Wikipedia; one with the pages “Islamic State of Iraq and Levant”, “Foreign involvement in the Syrian Civil War”, “Spillover of the Syrian Civil War”, “War on terror”. The map that used as starting seeds the pages belonging to the Wikipedia category “ISIS” puts in relation Islamic religion, the status of women in the Arab world, and the military operations in the Syrian civil war. The map generated with the selected pages shows an interlaced frame of the Middle East question, human behaviours and psychology which meet predominantly in the setting of war and terrorism, with a large area dedicated to American politics.

Data

Timestamp: 06/12/2016 - 08/12/2016

Data source: Seealsology, Wikipedia

Download data

The data is organized in files that one can use to recreate the network using Gephi, and contains all the information about distance of seeds etc. The additional file .json allows to recreate the network with other softwares and to explore the pages on the map.