The JISC OER Rapid Innovation programme is coming to a close and as the 15 projects do their final tiding up it’s time to start thinking about the programme as a whole, emerging trends, lesson learned and help projects disseminate their outputs. One of the discussions we’ve started with Amber Thomas, the programme manager, is how best to go about this. Part of our support role at CETIS has been to record some of the technical and standards decisions taken by the projects. Phil Barker and I ended up having technical conversations with 13 of the 15 projects which are recorded in the CETIS PROD Database in the Rapid Innovation strand. One idea was see if there were any technology or standards themes we could use to illustrate what has been done in these areas. Here are a couple of ways to look at this data.

To start with PROD has some experimental tools to visualise the data. By selecting the Rapid Innovation strand as selecting ‘Stuff’ we get this tag cloud. We can see JSON, HTML5 and RSS are all very prominent. Unfortunately some of the context is lost as we don’t know without digging deeper which projects used JSON etc. 

To get more context I thought it would be useful to put the data in a network graph (click to enlarge).

We can now see which projects (blue dots) used which tech/standards (brown dots) and again JSON, HTML5 and RSS are prominent. Selecting these (image right) we can see it covers most of the projects (no. 10), so these might be some technology themes we could talk about. But what about the remain projects?

As a happy accident I put the list of technologies/standards into Voyant Tools (similar to Wordle but way more powerful – I need to write a post about it) and got the graph below:

Because the wordcloud is generated from words rather than phrases the frequency is different: : api (16), rss (6), youtube (6), html5 (5), json (5). So maybe there is also a story about APIs and YouTube.

Last updated by Martin Hawksey at October 18, 2012.