### Burrow the Burrows ###

I started using Gopher at uni in the late '90s, and a lot was going on
in Gopherspace at that time. Then I used it more and more rarely, just
to "rediscover" it a couple of years ago. I was really surprised to find
Gopher alive and with lots of stuff in there. And I fell back in love. 

For several different reasons, I have always had a peculiar fixation for
graphs and networks. Bring together Gopher and graphs, and the project 
"Burrow the Burrows" is born. 

## WTF? ##

I have been slowly crawling the gopherspace (only type 1 selectors) to
produce a comprehensive graph and to obtain some statistics to share
with the community. My intention is to do the crawl *once*, construct
the graph of menus, and make it freely available (in anonymised form,
i.e. sha256sums of selectors) together with some aggregated stats about
its structure, e.g. about number of servers and selectors, degree
distribution, typical distances between nodes, clusters, centrality
distribution, etc, and maybe a couple of plots. 

The main idea is to provide a quantitative understanding of how the
gopherspace looks like today. In particular, a quantitative graph
analysis might signal the presence of resources or servers that are
poorly linked with the rest of the gopherspace, and whose removal might
hinder the reachability of other parts of the graph. 

If the experiment succeds and the crawling is not too obtrusive, I might
decide to redo it once a year, to see how the Gopherspace evolves over
time. 

## WHY? ##

I am a lecturer in a maths department and my main area of research is
network science. I study all kinds of graphs for fun, I have written
some code to analyse networks and I have also developed a few
gopher-related programs for the same reason.  I have always been
convinced that having fun doing stuff is the best way to do it to a good
standard. 

I started this project because I wanted to contribute some of what I
have learned about graphs to the Gopher community. I will publish here
not just the data (the bare graph) but also the methods and software I
use to analyse them and to obtain any result I get. This is to guarantee
that "Burrows the Burrows" does not remain an isolated experiment
triggered by the hottest summer in the last 35 years, but becomes part
of the Gopher culture instead.

## CONTACTS ##

Comments, critics, suggestions, and all sorts of feedback are very
welcome. Just drop me an email. My gopherhole is at

  gopher://kalos.mine.nu

There should be enough information there for a motivated person to be
able to find me easily ;)

(20180803 KatolaZ)