History Flow

Introduction

"History flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki pages on Wikipedia." Fore more, see "What is History Flow" [1, 2].

Installation

Locate an old copy of History Flow or ask a tech guy from DMI to send it to you. You might need to install Java too.

To be able to import MediaWiki articles or MoinMoin pages you will have to install a specific (old) version of JTidy: 04aug2000r7-dev. Download the zip to your computer and locate the zip (do not unzip it) with "File->install JTidy" in the menu bar of History Flow. Restart History Flow.

How to use History Flow

You can learn about the interface here.

To use History Flow on Wikipedia articles, go to "File -> MediaWiki article" in the menu bar. You will be presented with two input fields:

Export URL

This is used to export data from Wikipedia. By default History Flow exports the first 100 revisions from an article on the English Wikipedia.

• You can export from other language versions by changing the URL in this input field. E.g. to export from the Dutch Wikipedia you would use http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export
• History Flow can only display 100 revisions. To visualize other revisions than just the first 100, you can use the Wikipedia History Flow Companion

Article Title

This is the title of the page, as specified in the URL. E.g. to look at the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_History_Flow_tool you would enter IBM_History_Flow_tool

References

Viégas, F., Wattenberg, M., Kushal, D. (2004). “Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations,” In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 575-582