Accidentally in Code

Tag: abstract

  • A Process for Writing an Abstract

    A Process for Writing an Abstract

    spelling danbo
    Credit: Flickr / Matt Newfield

    As part of the Technically Speaking Anniversary last week I did two mentoring calls. Both of them focused on writing abstracts. This is cool, because one of the things I discovered when Chiu-Ki and I ran our workshop is that Abstract Writing is something of a speciality for me and I actually quite enjoy writing them for other people.

    General Comments About Abstracts

    • Your abstract is a pitch for your talk. It’s when you sell the topic.
    • Your bio is where you sell yourself as a good person to speak about the topic.
    • It doesn’t need to be long.
    • Be concrete, but not overly detailed. E.g. specific takeaways are good, the details of how you get to them are unnecessary.

    Three Lists

    Think about your topic and make three lists.

    1. Why is this topic important.
    2. What things do you want people to take away from it.
    3. What points do you plan to cover.

    List #3 is the easiest, but lists #1 and #2 are most useful for writing your abstract.

    A Formula

    [Strong statement about why this topic is important at a macro level]. [Specific points that tie your more narrow topic to this macro point].

    This talk will cover [2-3 most important points], after which you will be able to [concrete audience takeaway].

  • Applied Clique Finding: Discovering More About Your Twitter Network

    Abstract for a talk I’m giving tomorrow some time between 1300h and 1500h at the University of Ottawa. Let me know if you want to attend (slides will be up later).

    Follower / Following networks are essentially meaningless on Twitter due to the prevalence of spam. However by creating the graphs of conversation networks it is possible to create a better picture of more meaningful connections – the other users that interact / are interacted with by a given user. For power users, however, these graphs can be extremely busy, making it difficult to pick out the most important conversations and connections.

    One potential way to summarize the most important connections in a network is to pull out cliques – completely connected sub-graphs. These cliques may represent part of a users core network, or a suggestion of new users to interact with by generating those cliques that a user is connected to. For example, user A might be in a clique with users B, C, D and users B, C, D may be in a clique with a 5th user, E. This suggests that user A might well be interested to interact with user E, as well. This may also help us determine tie strength as well, as a clique is likely an indication of a stronger tie strength than just a singly connected node.