10 Amazing Visualizations of Social Networks

networkviz

Social networks are dynamic and constantly evolving. While we can easily identify our friends and acquaintances within a network, it’s much harder for us to comprehend how members in a social network are connected and how those connections influence a particular network.

Fortunately, there are now a number of people that have taken the time to create stunning visualizations of various social networks that give us a better understanding of how networks function. We take a look at our ten favourite visualizations of social networks.

Fidg’t’ : Visualize

fidgt

The Fidg’t Visualizer allows you to play around with your network. You interface with the Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create a Magnet. Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with that same Tag.

ICCARUS: scouta.com

Click here to watch the video.

A 3D visualization of real-time data from scouta.com. It shows the relationship between members, friends, groups and items.

looks del.icio.us

looksdelicious

The looks del.icio.us project is my first attempt to combine graphics design with programming. The concept is to see how users develop and sustain their tagging methodologies on del.icio.us.

Myspace attitudes

myspace-attitudes

Two big (200cm x 90cm, 80 x 36 inch) posters show the variety and attitudes of members from an internet community like MySpace.

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=598&index=598&domain=

IRC arcs

irc-arcs

A simple visualization of IRC communication behavior: Who is talking to whom? Or, more appropriately: Who is namedropping whom?

Biblical Social Network

bible-viz

Soon after finishing the cross-references arc visualization, I set out to create a new data set derived from the Bible’s text. This time I wanted to better capture the story, most notably the people and places, and the interactions between them. I did this by building a list of biblical names (2619 in total) and parsing a digital copy of the King James Bible. Each time two names occurred in the same verse, a connection was created between them. This produced essentially a social network of people and places. Because such relationships had no ordering or structure (unlike the cross references), I used a spatial clustering algorithm I developed for one of my other projects. This process causes related entities and highly connected groups to coalesce. I themed the output like an old piece of parchment.

Wells Fargo: Network Environment

wells-fargo

The image shows the 2 Step Network Environment of Wells Fargo, the second most influential actor in our Network Analysis of California’s Fortune 500 companies. We were interested which director interlock connections make Wells Fargo so powerful and how it is embedded in the greater California/ US industry. Director interlock shows how companies are connected with one another through their board of directors, i.e. Apple and Disney are connected through Steve Jobs. 2 Steps mean that directors on the board of Wells Fargo are connected to all companies displayed in a “friend of a friend” relation. This reveals compelling new insights and business opportunities.

OS Relationships

osrelationships
OPENSTUDIO is an experimental web service on the art market and creative digital communities. It exposes the traditionally opaque process of valuation, marketing and exchange of creative production, developing over time. In doing so, OPENSTUDIO provides a dynamic participatory space for learning about the underlying mechanisms surrounding pricing and exchange of art.

flowerGarden

flowergarden

flowerGarden is an web-based software application, produced in Flash, for real-time social network and conversation visualization. It was used at the 3-day Bodies in Play summit in Banff, May 2005, at which the 50 participants were invited to input information about who they spoke to and what they discussed during the duration of the event. The visualization was projected on a large screen in the main summit venue to reflect the current state of the social network and discussion space of the summit.

Power Players: Pinpoint and Predict

powerpoint

In a large European country we tried to predict who might be invited onto a governmental advisory board to help re-shape policies within a certain sector. Publicly available data about political functions and professional/scientific interaction were analysed. Ex post our methods proved very stable.

You can find a number of other great visualizations from fas-research here.

Many of the visualizations above can be found at the excellent site, visual complexity. If you want more information on data visualization, then check out these great blogs:

infosthetics.com
neoformix.com
flowingdata.com
anonymousprof.com
datamining.typepad.com

If you’re interested in mapping out your own social network, then have a look at the infovis wiki or try out a few of the tools on this site (just don’t ask me how to use them).

The ManyEyes tool by IBM also provides an easy way to map your connections. We used it to create a visualization of the top 100 StumbleUpon users.

Our question to you is, if you could visualize any social network from any time in history, what would you investigate and why?

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49 Readers have left their thoughts

  1. I’ve worked on this piece, although not as graphical, it’s quite useful!

    http://idletogether.com/ufo/digg/

    [reply to this comment]

    Chris (Admin) reply on July 31, 2008:

    Hi Nicolas - that looks really nice. Out of interest, how long did it take you make?

    [reply to this comment]

    Nicolas Noben reply on August 1, 2008:

    Hi Chris,

    2 evenings.

    cheers
    nic.

    [reply to this comment]

    Nicolas Noben reply on August 1, 2008:

    I am also working on this piece called Digg’s Mob. It pulls live comments from Digg regardless of the post.

    a proof of concept here:
    http://glimpsr.com/diggMob/

    subscribe to my blog at idletogether.com/ and noben.org/ to keep in touch :)

    cheers
    nic

    [reply to this comment]

  2. very nice list! I think you get a whole different idea of what it is when you see the images. I like also the image that gives you TouchGraph about a site, although is not exactly a social net, but it´s also interesting

    [reply to this comment]

  3. Very nice visualizations. What I would like to see is whether there are some mathematical functions that repeatedly show up in such data.

    [reply to this comment]

  4. Craig

    I want a social network map of George Bush and Dick Cheney, because it would offer indisputable evidence that these two men have connections that are at odds with the well-being of the US.

    [reply to this comment]

    Chris (admin) reply on August 1, 2008:

    That would be a good network to analyse. It would also be quite interesting to map out who is funding the major political candidates. Thanks for your comment.

    [reply to this comment]

  5. Maybe in this post can also go: http://www.tweetwheel.com/

    [reply to this comment]

    Chris (admin) reply on August 1, 2008:

    Hi phpleo, I was going to include tweetwheel, but it wasn’t loading when I tried to use it. It is a really nice project though.

    [reply to this comment]

  6. Amazing visualizations. It reminds me of old fractal expressions.

    [reply to this comment]

  7. Here is another very cool Twitter visualizer from Tuesday’s SoCal earthquake:

    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/07/twitter-earthqu.html

    [reply to this comment]

    Chris (admin) reply on August 1, 2008:

    Thanks for the link Mark, that looks really cool.

    [reply to this comment]

  8. Some of that is just sheer genius, there are some extremely clever people out there!

    [reply to this comment]

  9. Interesting, i like what you have done

    [reply to this comment]

  10. amazing visualisations, what more can i say!?

    [reply to this comment]

  11. With the growing number of networks and friends across the internet, it was going to be very difficult to manage all that. I am happy to know all this and infact I am using a few. It is very helping and supportive.

    [reply to this comment]

  12. few weeks ago i’ve built this interactive visualization of soundcloud:
    http://radioclouds.com
    it’s kinda mix between graphing and online radio. audio/visual graphing, sotosay…

    [reply to this comment]

    Nicolas Noben reply on August 1, 2008:

    Great work.

    [reply to this comment]

    Chris (admin) reply on August 1, 2008:

    hi matas - that looks like a really cool project too. Did it take you long?

    [reply to this comment]

    Matas reply on August 2, 2008:

    thanks Chris,

    It took about a week of coding, although divided in 2 months :)

    The Soundcloud api seems to work pretty well now, and already thought about extending the radioclouds with more relevant data.

    [reply to this comment]

  13. Very very good Thank you ..

    [reply to this comment]

  14. Hi marquee hire, adelaide, website development,bespoke shirts, Happy Times, Dave Saunders, istioselida, Neal “thePuck” Jansons and everyone else, thanks for your comments. Glad you liked the selection. It’s also worth checking out the other sites linked in the article if you want to see some other data visualization projects.

    [reply to this comment]

  15. I love the graphs. Here’s my answer to your question at the end of the post.

    In a previous life, I studied for a Ph.D in high-modernist English Literature. I’d love to see a social network visualization that presents three layers of overlapping data:

    1) a visualization of James Joyce’s personal social network
    2) a visualization of works in his library and notebooks
    3) a visualization of works referenced in Ulyssess

    That’d be something that would leave me drooling for days.I’m not sure what I’d do with it. It’d just be really, really neat to explore (like getting lost within a Mandelbrot set).

    Then again, an overlay map of Thomas Jefferson’s social network and his library would also be pretty interesting too.

    [reply to this comment]

  16. Hey! Thats something really wonderful you did here. I was shocked when i saw those images because something like this came in mind some time before but never thought to implement it but, you did it. This is my first visit and first comment and I think I will come often to this place. Keep up the good work.

    [reply to this comment]

  17. Really, it’s much harder for us to comprehend how members in a social network are connected and how those connections influence a particular network. Interesting blog.

    [reply to this comment]

  18. What a beautiful visualitions! Very nice idea.

    [reply to this comment]

  19. Nice list, great visualizations. Interesting is that i couldn’t find one for the Facebook. That would be nice to see also.

    [reply to this comment]

  1. Anonymous - Jul 31st, 2008


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