ThisIsLike was invited to take part in SI (Summer Intensive) residency in Gent, Belgium, produced by Les ballets C de la B, initiated by Christine De Smedt and co-curated by Myriam Van Imschoot.

If you are interested in networks, their characteristics, and their relationship to real-life phenomena, here's our ongoing research. Feel free to navigate through and add your own ideas! First, a "zoom out" snapshot for some key concepts in the subject area represented through the great tool made by Alexis Jacomy GexfWalker:

We are surrounded by networks: the Facebook "friends", the film directors we like, the bands we listen to, the ideas we are engaged with... They are all interrelated and form intricate networks of knowledge. The structure of these networks sometime contains much more information than the actual content within them. For example, it is through network visualization that one can see the most "influential" nodes – the ones that act as connectors between different communities and nodes. This knowledge can help identify the best points of entry into the network, as well as find out important ideas forming the core of a concept.

This is one of the reasons we created ThisIsLike – to help people keep track of their networks, providing an easy tool to create, manage, and visualize them. ThisIsLike Mind Player is one of the tools we offer, which provides a sort of "zoom in" view on your network: the central item and all the items related to it. You can create your own network or collaborate with the others, sharing your knowledge, tastes, and information in a more intuitive and playful way.

For example, take a look at this network I created for David Lynch, one of my favorite directors:

You can now export your data from ThisIsLike in graphml format (a variation of XML). This allows you to visualize the items and relationships you added through ThisIsLike as a network in software like Gephi.

In order to do it, just click "Visual Map Export" under the tag cloud of the item and then choose "Graphml" option. If you need an example, try to do it with ThisIsLike.Com item itself.

You've probably seen a lot of network visualizations on this blog recently, which were made partially using Gephi – an amazing platform for network visualization.

A web developer is needed to work on the projects associated with ThisIsLike.Com – the cross-disciplinary collaborative recommendation system ( http://thisislike.com ). The work would involve optimizing the software's back-end (PHP/MySQL), maintaining the current project, developing new functionality.

In this article I will show how network analysis can be used to analyze live performance events and visualize time-based processes as graphs. I will also demonstrate how such analysis can be helpful to reveal the way meaning circulates in a live performance event and how it relates to our subjective perception of the event.

The performance "Allege" by Clement Layes from Public in Private (Berlin) was used for this analysis – you can watch a trailer of it below, which I highly recommend as it's a great show! And I want to thank Clement for lending me the full text of his performance for this research.

Some text network analysis of The Guardian's last article on the debates between Brown, Cameron, and Clegg. What's interesting is how such analysis can reveal a certain agenda within the text. By mapping the text's relationships using Automap and Gephi we create a discursive and emotive map of the text. It's then interesting to see how the main concepts which exist within the text relate to the main "emotive clusters". We can also find several "loops" within the text (these loops are subnetworks for meaning circulation) and see how they relate to the text network at large.

Doing text network analysis of Michel Foucault's "The Archaelogy of Knowledge" is almost like googling the Google itself. For one thing, it can provide a very interesting insight into the method, as well as test it on a text, which would not yield obvious relationships too easily.

This book by Foucault is of a particular interest, because it's an attempt to represent and research "knowledge" as a network for information circulation, subject to certain rules and power formations, which, in turn, constantly re-shape the network and transform it from the inside. The vision Foucault offers in this book is very much related to the way ThisIsLike.Com works as well.

This Is Like is taking part at re:publica 2010 conference dedicated to social media and digital economy. Our workshop is taking place at 12.00 on the 16th of April at Kalkscheune on Johannisstraße 2, 10117 (behind Friedrichstadtpalast where the conference's headquarters are).

Here's the official description, you can also find some information on the workshop's page on re:publica site.

We'll post all the materials from the workshop here a few days after it's done.

(photo by Claudia Thomas)