Map of french book blogs

A poster on "book blogs". I like this : a short selection ( ~ 100, the same amount I'try to visualize), a cluster effect, (which structure the space) and few bridge blogs that are highlighted.

It's look like I want to do. But building such a representation automatically is no so easy. To handle that I'm trying to connect my perl scripts with R to work on the map construction by my self. And particularly on the automatic clustering. I work on algorithm from Raftery, Hoff,... on social latent space.

For the moment, I've only try some simple thinks such asy multidimensional scaling (MDS) using the shortest path distance of the graph.

You can obtain something like that with as few as 3 lines of R. MDS is used to position node; mixture model being then use to find the cluster.



It's just a try and there is a lot to do to have something good enough bur it seems to me that R suited well for what I want to do.