Document:Q10037

SOCIOSCAN.
A project by Petko Dourmana - http://www.socioscan.net
SociоScan Project is a web interface (platform) for the scanning and
mapping of personal information that is exchanged in virtual
communication, particularly in chat rooms. The methodology is
reminiscent of the medical test for the detection of sociopathic
disorders, where a brain scanner is used to indicate in real time the
mutations in the brain functions, based on the reactions to emotional
words and/or images.
The project scans and visualizes people's communications in the chat
rooms through a statistical analysis of the use of various key words
with emotional meaning in selected chat channels on the Internet. The
output is a colorized clustering map, operating with: size, color and
brightness, representing in real time the changes in the use of listed
emotional words. The visual aesthetics of the map is similar to the
image of the human brain, created by the PET (Positron emission
tomography) scanner.
For the project’s purpose a special IRC bot has been developed. It
operates in the chat channels, indicating the use of key words with
emotional resonance. The keywords are given to the bot in an advanced
list in order to recognize them.
The user can reinforce the activity of chat channels by spreading out
sentences that include some words with emotional resonance and also to
add words from the web interface.
Whenever the bot detects the use of one of the keywords, it streams a
report to the server that visualizes in real time the statistic trough
web interface. The visualization system of the project SociоScan map
uses the “treemap” algorithm - a space-constrained visualization of
hierarchical structures, developed by the Human Computer Interaction
Lab, University of Maryland. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap