Saturday, 8 March 2008
Welcome to the SocSciBot4 Blog
Please post any bugs or problems you have with SocSciBot4 here - these will help other users to know of any problems and the problems will eventually be picked up and solved by me. Please also feel free to respond to any other users' problems if you know of a solution.
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9 comments:
Dear Mr Thelwall,
Wow perfect you created a SSB Blog!
This project rocks!
But I still didn`t realy understand the crawling algorithm. When I try your "small test" from the tutorial I will get only 3 domains connected with each other if I only look at the dom->dom connections. But for examplte "The above 2043 links are from: cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk" are not crawled and included?! When does the crawler stop to not craw a followed link? My limitation of links is still at 15.000. Thnaks in advance! Sincerely yours,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your comment. When you switch to the dom-dom model, you will only see links between the three domains crawled (linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk, cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk and socscibot.wlv.ac.uk), with all the pages within each site collapsed to the hosting domain. If you want to see links to domains other than these 3 then change the Link Type Options to include links to sites not crawled, and the other links will disappear.
This is slightly strange behaviour! The reason is that SocSciBot was originally designed to analyse the links between a set of web sites, ignoring all web sites not crawled.
Best wishes,
Mike
PS When crawling linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk, SocSciBot will crawl all URLs that it can find starting with linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk but it wont go "off site" to crawl any pages on other sites, even if there are links in pages in linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk that point to off-site pages.
Dear Mr. Thelwall
I have data collected with SocSciBot3.
Is there any problem to work with them if I install SocSciBot4?
Thanks a lot.
Hi Joan,
There should be no problem with using SocSciBot 4 on crawls from SocSciBot 3 because they are designed to use the same format data and results. But SocSciBot 4 is not fully tested yet so please backup your data just in case.
Best wishes,
Mike
Thanks Mr. Thelwall,
Just a couple of additional prosaic questions:
- Is it possible to use SocSciBot4 without to uninstall SocSciBot3? Furthermore, as SocSciBot4 is a pre-release version, can be used both versions alternatively, to detect hypothetical bugs on version 4?
- SocSciBot4 installation file “incorporates SocSciBot Tools and Cyclist”. The previous installations of “SocSciBot Tools” and “Cyclist” must be uninstalled before to install SocSciBot4?
Finally a SocSciBot-related novelty: Networks / Pajeck:
http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/
(Referenced on “Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach”, p. 172), is now a Wiki:
http://pajek.imfm.si/doku.php
Thanks.
Hi Joan,
Thanks for your information about Pajek! Maybe I will create a Wiki for SocSciBot too one day.
You don't need to uninstall any of the previous software before installing and using SocSciBot 4. You should also be able to use them interchangeably - for example collect with SocSciBot 4 and process with SocSciBot3 Tools. Or process with SocSciBot 4 and then view the results in SocSciBot 3 Tools. They all use the same data and results formats and should give the same results except in unusual situations (strange URLs).
If you spot any SocSciBot 4 bugs, please let me know!
Best wishes,
Mike
Dear Mike,
I’m still using MSOffice 2003. It seems that SocSciBot4 Tools only works with a later version because it doesn’t identify Excel 2003 as Excel. Even the Excel logo seems to be from 2007 version.
Is there some way to use Excel 2003 with SocSciBot4 Tools?
Thanks.
Hi Joan,
Thanks for your comment. SocSciBot 4 should work with all versions of Excel but the problem might be that it can't find your copy of Excel because it is in a folder named in Spanish or Catalan and SocSciBot is not very clever at coping with different languages. The way around this is to start SocSciBot 4, go to the tools interface and click on the File menu and the "Pajek and Excel locations" option. In the dialog box that appears you will have to find Excel on your own computer and enter the location of the program. Once you have done this and saved the changes, it should always work afterwards.
Hope this helps!
Best wishes,
Mike
Hello Mike,
In fact I wrote the Excel path location on SocSciBot.ini from SocSciBot4.
Just entering on "File" > "Pajek and Excel program locations", without any change action, Excel works fine.
Thanks,
Joan
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