Procedure for moving from actors to networks to locations.
The source document URL from each of the 104 quotes composing the index of issues was recorded and listed into a spreadsheet. Duplicate URLs were identified in the spreadsheet and eliminated from the list using the “duplicate values” tool in Microsoft Excel, leaving a total of 71 URLs. The spreadsheet was then saved as a “.csv” file and imported into Hyphe.
Using the default settings in Hyphe, we then crawled each website (what Hyphe terms “web entities”) in the list, only one web entity was a deadlink that Hyphe could not crawl, thus 70 web entities were crawled. The output produced a list of web entities (458 discovered in addition to the 70 original web entities, totaling 528) and the amount of times each discovered web entity was cited. Each discovered web entity was manually curated to remove irrelevant web entities to the “e-waste debate” (e.g. advertisements, social media, search engines, etc.) and produce a more manageable network.
The network of web entities curated in Hyphe was exported and the geolocation of each entity's IP address was identified using the Digital Methods Initiative's GeoIP tool. Note that the geographic locations of IP addresses refer to the location of web servers hosting given IP addresses. The location of the server and the location of the organization associated with the website/IP address are not always identical. IP addresses with location coordinates (latitude/longitude) were imported to Google maps for display.
The web entity file with geolocated IP addresses was then imported into Gephi, a free and open source, network analysis and visualization software. Gephi enables a variety of steps for visualization including coloring nodes and exporting the graph file in an interactive graphic using the Sigma.js plugin.