vizster: visualizing online social networks authors: jeffrey heer and danah boyd presented by:...
Post on 02-Jan-2016
221 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks
Authors: Jeffrey Heer and Danah Boyd
Presented by:Jeanne Kramer-Smyth
Machon Gregory
Goals for Vizster
• Fun
• New way to visualize and explore social networks
Social Networking Sites
1993 2007
Identity Groups of FriendsterEarly Adoptors
• Gay men
• Techies/bloggers
• “Burners” (those who attend Burning Man)
More About Friendster
• Originally meant to be a dating site
• People joined because their friends joined
• “Fakesters” – fake profiles created to connect people with shared interests
• Competition to collect as many people as possible in order to be on the ‘first page’ of friend lists
Vizster Overview
• Ego-centric graph view of a social network
• Allows for data exploration
• Search, Connections, Clustering, X-ray View
• Animated force directed layout– Barnes-Hut Algorithm
• Linkage based clustering algorithm– Newman's Community Identification Algorithm
Mechanics with Pictures
• Connected people move closer together• Large groups of connected people push
away other large groups of people• People with few connections are pulled in
to ‘orbit’ large groups of people
Demo Video
Initial View
• Egocentric• Not full overview –
only shows those people connected to central person
• Includes connections between all users displayed.
Search
• Highlights people matching search criteria
• Greys out all other displayed people
Show Connections
• Permits users to find out how two displayed users are connected
• Will add connecting users to display
• Not obvious in interface – but useful once explained.
Clusters Create Communities
• Clustering logic based on linkages creates community displays
• Slide bar permits users to step through the phases of grouping to find what ‘looks right’ – supports subjective view of groups
X-Ray View
• Users select attribute to display (such as gender or number of connections)
• Removing photos and other visual cues supports seeing patterns of selected attribute
X-Ray View + Search
• Powerful combination
• Still greys out those people who do not fit the search criteria
• Still color codes results based on selected x-ray attribute
Underlying Technologies
• Prefuse is an extensible framework written
in Java designed to create interactive
information visualization tools
– Vizster, Namesearcher, Social Action
• Lucene is a search engine API
– Wikipedia, Beagle, CNet
Evaluation of Vizster
• Social observation – 500 person party in San Francisco
• Individual observation in lab setting
Questions?
top related