Tracking your graphs’ impact to find out how people are reacting to them
We are excited to announce a new feature, Stats on Graph Commons.
Graph Commons is a collaborative platform for mapping, analyzing and publishing data networks. It empowers people and organizations to transform their data into interactive maps and untangle complex relations that impact them and their communities. Whether you use data mapping for investigative journalism, archival exploration, or content curating it is critical to understand how your audience is engaging with your published data. The goal of Graph Commons is to support quality data publishing, in addition to easy mapping and analysis of data, so our reasoning around stats is that we need to provide meaningful metrics about your work.
As of today, you can find out what kind of attention your graphs are getting and how people are reacting to them. Graph Commons stats provide feedback that normal web analytics don’t give you. We think feedback from your stats will help you create more compelling graphs. If you already have an account, view your stats from the direct link below, it’s that expected URL:
Graph Views
You can view your graphs’ impact over time in daily, weekly, monthly durations as well as in a custom date range. On your stats page, the initial chart shows views for all your graphs. The table underneath lists the individual graphs with engagement details, where you can compare with each other at a glance. You can sort the list of graphs by date, number of views, recommends, comments etc.
When you click on a graph in the list, the chart displays particular engagement stats for that graph. You can change the date range to observe a larger duration, change the zoom to level to look at monthly or weekly sum of views your graph received. Check your stats when you do an update on your graph, when you publicize on social media, investigate a recent heightened attention on a particular graph and what not.
You can go deeper and explore engagement on your graph data points (nodes) by clicking on “View Top Nodes” of a graph.
Node Views
One thing you may have noticed about Graph Commons is that clicking on nodes open information cards to provide more details (image, description, properties, and list of relations). Node cards deepen the exploration by allowing you to switch back and forth between macro picture and micro views. Now with Stats, you can see how much of your graph is explored over time, which nodes grab more attention. Graph Commons is the first and only place on the web to provide such engagement analytics for network maps.
On a graph’s stats page, you check the most viewed nodes and how much attention they get among all the other nodes on your graph. We think this level of granular feedback will provide you insight about your audience’s interest on your published data.
Recommends and Comments
No need to say, your graphs receive comments and recommends on Graph Commons. Recommends are used to bookmark interesting graphs as well as to provide reactions to graph editors. Comments are commonly used for giving feedback, annotating the graph, sharing links to related data sources, and sometimes just as a chat room for cartographers :). On the stats page, you can check out the number of recommends and comments your graphs receive over time.
Weekly Reports
Every friday, you’ll get a weekly email report about your graphs highlighting the engagement and attention your data received over the week. This will be a convenient summary that you can quickly read from your inbox.
Take me to the stats page
In addition to the direct link https://graphcommons.com/me/stats, you can view stats from a couple of places.
Mouse over your profile in the upper right corner to open the user menu and click on “Stats”. Your profile page also contains a link to Stats.
To view one of your graph’s stats, just mouse over the graph title and click on “Stats” on the graph menu.
We hope Stats provides meaningful metrics about your published data maps. We welcome feedback on your experience, it will help us refine the platform further for everybody. Please send all suggestions, questions and comments to contact@graphcommons.com we’d love to hear from you.
If you want to try Graph Commons, sign up for free and start creating and publishing your own graphs.
Follow @graphcommons on Twitter for a daily dose of network arts and sciences, read our publication on Medium for guides and in depth articles,
join our Slack chat channel for discussions.
