Issue Geographer

Use the Issuegeographer to show on a geographical map where organizations in an issue network are based. The Issuegeographer takes Issuecrawler results, scrapes a whois.net service, and plots the sites' registration address (latitude / longitude of the city) to a geographical map.

As a starting point:

• upload an Issuecrawler result file (.xml), or:

• submit a list of URLs (either with or without the http://), one URL per line.

You can also choose to create an empty map and add the locations manually:

See the IssueCrawler movie for an explanation on how to use the Issuecrawler and the Issuegeographer.

The A2K, or access to knowledge, movement comprises an array of civil society organizations and academics, and is concerned with easing the means by which knowledge may be circulated between legal regimes. Prior to the A2K conference at Yale in April 2007, the question arose about the composition of the movement. How global is it? How may one characterize the distribution of northern and southern organizations.

The list of organizations involved in the movement was supplied by one of the participants at the conference. The organizations were entered into the Issuecrawler, and co-link analysis was performed. The resulting map showed the dominance of particularly U.S.-based organizations. Here is a rank list of actors in the A2K issue network, per April 2007, with the ranking based on inlink count from network?

Top 10 Actors per inlink count
1 - creativecommons.org - 57
2 - eff.org - 48
3 - cptech.org - 34
4 - epic.org - 28
5 - lessig.org - 26
6 - aclu.org - 26
7 - gnu.org - 25
8 - icann.org - 25
9 - wipo.int - 23
10 - cdt.org - 23

The Issuegeographer visualizes the places of actors, that is, the locations of the organizations in the network. The A2K movement appears to be largely a 'northern' movement, with a smattering of representatives from the south.

A2K Network Geography, April 2007. Data by the Issuecrawler. Visualization by the Issuegeographer. Annotated southern organizations and places.