%% DATAVIEW_PUBLISHER: start
```dataviewjs
const table = dv.markdownTable(
["Metadata Field", "Value"],
Object.entries(dv.current())
.filter(([key]) => {
const allowedKeys = ["tags", "post_status", "date_modified"];
return allowedKeys.includes(key);
})
.map(([key, value]) => {
try {
// --- Key Renaming ---
if (key === "post_status") {
key = "post status";
} else if (key === "date_modified") {
key = "last modified";
}
// --- Value Reformatting ---
if (key === "last modified") {
try {
const parsedDate = moment(new Date(value));
if (parsedDate.isValid()) {
value = parsedDate.format("YYYY-MM-DD");
} else {
console.log("Invalid date format:", value);
}
} catch (error) {
console.error("Error parsing date:", error);
}
} else if (Array.isArray(value)) {
value = value.map((item) => "#" + item);
}
return [
key, // Removed icon prepending
key === "tags" || key === "post status" ? value.join(" ") : value,
];
} catch (error) {
console.error("Error processing metadata:", error);
return [key, "Error"];
}
}),
);
dv.paragraph(table);
```
%%
%% | Metadata Field | Value |
| -------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| tags | [#digital-preservation](app://obsidian.md/index.html#digital-preservation) [#data-visualization](app://obsidian.md/index.html#data-visualization) [#knowledge-organization](app://obsidian.md/index.html#knowledge-organization)[#quantitative-analysis](app://obsidian.md/index.html#quantitative-analysis) |
| post status | #article |
| last modified | 2025-02-04 | %%
%% DATAVIEW_PUBLISHER: end %%
![[fko-00-cover.png | Flashpoint Archive KO Analysis— cover image]]
>[!summary|no-t] Summary
>>[!summary|problem txt-ss] Problem
>>The Flashpoint Archive, a massive digital preservation project, relies on a decentralized, remote volunteer workforce using multiple, disparate knowledge repositories. How can we understand and visualize the flow of information within this complex system to identify strategic opportunities for optimization?
>
>>[!summary|role txt-ss ] My Role
>>As a solo researcher for this academic project, I designed the study, developed custom scripts to scrape and clean the data, conducted the quantitative analysis in R, created the data visualizations, and synthesized the findings.
>
>>[!summary|outcome txt-ss ] Outcome
>>Produced a series of chord diagrams visualizing 4,920 intra- and inter-repository redirects. The analysis revealed a tension between the project's decentralized workforce and its reliance on a de facto centralized knowledge source, leading to a strategic recommendation for a content audit.
# uncover
>[!column|flex 2 no-t]
>>[!logs-point|no-i ttl-c txt-c ttl-b txt-s] 6
>>knowledge repositories analyzed
>
>>[!logs-point|no-i ttl-c txt-c ttl-b txt-s] 2
>>data sources scraped
>
>>[!logs-point|no-i ttl-c txt-c ttl-b txt-s] 4,920
>>redirects identified
>
>>[!logs-point|no-i ttl-c txt-c ttl-b txt-s] 1
>>KO scheme visualized
To map the relationships between the knowledge repositories, I needed to quantify the links between them. I used the MediaWiki API to scrape the Flashpoint Wiki and an open-source tool, DiscordChatExporter, to scrape the `#flashpoint-help` channel on their Discord server. This provided a raw dataset of all hyperlinks pointing from one repository to another.
# converge
The core of the "development" work for this project was data wrangling. I wrote custom scripts in **R** to clean the scraped data and count all intra- and inter-repository redirects. This process transformed unstructured hyperlink data into a structured dataset ready for analysis and visualization, identifying a total of **4,920** distinct redirects.
# generate
The analysis revealed the core tension predicted by information science theory: a conflict between the project's decentralized workforce (which should lead to a distributed KO) and its reliance on centralizing information technology.
To make this dynamic visible, I used the `chorddiag` package in R to create a series of interactive chord diagrams. The primary visualization immediately revealed a powerful insight: while the organization is distributed, its knowledge flow is highly centralized. The vast majority of redirects (4,241 of them) flowed from the conversational, ad-hoc environment of Discord to the structured, canonical knowledge base of the Wiki, establishing it as the **de facto central source of knowledge**.
| fko-3_1 | |
|:--------------- |:----------------------------------------------------------------------------:|
| ![[fko-01.png]] | **figure fko.1:** chord diagram highlighting the overwhelming flow of inter-repository redirects from the #flashpoint-help Discord channel to the Wiki |
This showed a clear tension: while knowledge was dispersed across multiple platforms, the community's behavior revealed a heavy reliance on a single, central source of truth. The visualizations effectively communicated a complex system dynamic that would have been invisible in a simple table of numbers.
^b6d3a9
| fko-3_2 | |
|:--------------- |:-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------:|
| ![[fko-03.png]] | **figure fko.2:** to improve legibility, this diagram excludes the two largest repositories, revealing the secondary relationships between the Manual, FAQs, and Curation Sitemap |
^14ac85
# reflect
## Strategic Impact
- **Applying theory to practice:** I applied an established information science model (Kasten's Model of Knowledge Strategy) to a real-world system, demonstrating the ability to ground practical analysis in academic theory.
- **Revealing emergent strategy through data:** My analysis made an invisible, emergent behavior visible, showing how a decentralized organization was organically centralizing its knowledge.
- **Developing custom research tools:** This project required me to build my own tools for data scraping and analysis, showcasing technical self-sufficiency in service of a research goal.
## Business Outcome
- As an academic project, the primary outcome was the analysis itself, which concluded with a strategic recommendation for the Flashpoint Archive to undertake a content audit.
- The project serves as a strong portfolio piece demonstrating advanced quantitative analysis, data visualization, and systems thinking skills applied to the complex domain of knowledge organization.
![[contact#^83635d]]