A between-subreddit activity visualization tool.
The final distributable for Windows can be found here. Running it on Linux requires the results.json from the distributable file, putting it in the same folder as server.py and then running python server.py, assuming Python has been installed beforehand.
The goal of this project is to visualize the relationship between subreddits on the online forum www.reddit.com. We will focus on relationships between subreddits. Several types of relations can be distinguished:
- User activity: A user that is active in two subreddits defines a relationship between these subreddits.
- X-Posting: Content is posted in multiple subreddits (same question, same url).
- Referral in comments: "Shout out to /r/thisothersub".
This visualization is intended to show characteristics of the userbase and subreddits, by showing related interests (based on the subreddits), and perhaps size of (overlapping) user communities in a later stage.
We intend to use the vis.js Graph visualization tool. This library provides an easy way of setting up a node graph to display the relations we want to visualize.
Reddit provides an API and a Python interface for it. This handy tool has driven us to our choice to use Python for data gathering and processing.
For the website, we will, predictably, use HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The deliverable for this project will be the graphing tool. It will be provided via a web interface. It should be interactive; the user should be able to zoom in on relations, selecting and focussing on subreddits. The user must also be able to search a subreddit (by name, and if available) and select it as the root node for the graph.