Linko is meant to help you build linkographies, which were made popular amongst design researchers after the work of Gabriela (:0) Goldschmidt.
There´s really not much to a linkography: it´s a map of links. But it has a great power to illustrate protocol data. To illustrate how linkographies are well acepted in this research filed, follow this search on Science Direct´s database.
I am using linkographies to depict some of my data, and that was the drive behind my decision of writting a software to do this. They are hard to draw by hand, as you have to focus your attention on a procedural task: linking protocol segments. As I´m not trying to reach Nirvana, I didn´t even gave it a try :0)
So here´s where Linko comes to play. The idea is to feed it with a csv file exported from excel, and voila, you have your graphs.
You can of course use it, but you´ll need to compile it with Flex 3.5. I could write a version that loads a local file, so there won´t be the need to re-compile it to build every graph, but I´ll do that later (now I have to re-turn my attention to the analysys, the coding fun is over!).
The images bellow shows two image generated by Linko, with the useTime parameter to true (the first) and false (the second).
And you see the software in action here (I suggest you turn fullscreen on, by hitting F11 on your keyboard).
And you can download the source here.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Dear Gabriela,
Thank you for your mail of Feb.2 about linkography. I tried to reply but my email bounced. Please write to me again with an address to which I can reply.
Best regards,
Gabriela Goldschmidt
August 7th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Dear Professore Gabriela Goldschmidt,
I would say my name is Zohre Torabi as a PhD student in filed of Architecture at Tehran University.
I have seen your papers and your program that you made which is Linkography & its software “linko”in this page but i could not install it and i really interesting to work on it, becasue i think it is useful and incredibale.
Would you please guide me how can i get it? Here i could not qualify to find it.Becasue I need it for my PhD thesis.
I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Regards
August 9th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Zohre,
My name is Gabriela, but I´m not Mrs. Goldschmidt :0)
Linko is not actually “instalable”, as it´s supposed to run on the borwser (it´s flash based). I can make it acept uploaded files to generate the linkography, but not rigth now. So, if you need it in a hurry, you could send me the files and I will hardcode them in the application (which is faster than make it aceppt uploaded files, albeit not very usable).
These files must have a specific format (csv). If you need to use the appliction, I can give you more information on these file requisite. See, as this software was designed for my personal use (I´m also a phd student :0) it´s not really very usable.
Waiting to hear from you; feel free to writte :0)
October 19th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Hi Zohre,
I used an analyzing tool called Linkographer for almost the same need.
It is based on fbs coding but it does draw a pretty decent linkograph from an Excel input file and generates a PDF output. You can probably use only that specific feature if you like.
It’s downloadable for free from http://www.linkographer.com
I hope that helps,
Kamy
October 19th, 2010 at 9:36 am
Kamy, great tip, thank you!
But what if the researcher is not using the FBS model?
October 30th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Hmmm, I think it “draws” any linkograph as far as the input file is formatted in the right way. The calculations however, are based on FBS model.