Category Archives: research interests

Pleasantly Perusing the Paper Pile with Pivots

A nice UI for browsing a database of academic papers: Marian Dörk’s PivotPaths. It arranges papers matching a search term along with a sort of linked tag-cloud of authors and other keywords for easy navigation. All the interaction is really nice (try dragging a line between two authors to compare them!). Papers queried from Microsoft Academic Search. Find it interesting how looking at a different database for my standard search terms reveals unfamiliar sets of papers (my vanity queries turned up nothing in the viz, tho they do have hits in Microsoft Academic Search). Would be really cool if you could point it to google scholar also to compare coverage. I like that, even ‘tho it was built at Microsoft Research, it uses open web standards! (SVG, oog). Have we reached the point where the best way to publicize a new data service is to get someone to build a viz with it? Via infosthetics.

The Other Kind of Network Marketing

Private Equity firms and shady deals from Darwin BondGraham

Oakland political economy journalist/blogger Darwin BondGraham has an interesting article about a court case that appears to reveal massive collusion between private equity firms to manipulate markets and cheat investors when doing leveraged buyouts (I think thats what “LBO” stands for?) of public companies. Darwin includes some network diagrams, apparently bi-partite networks of the major firms and their shady deals extracted from Dahl v. Bain court documents unsealed by the NYT. The document is a surprisingly riveting read, kind of like techno-thriller-horror script.

50 nets of Grey

Just saw this really nice blog post at badhession.org explaining how to do Exponential Random Graph Modeling (ERGM) using a sexual-hookup network from the TV show Grey’s Anatomy.

Grey's Anatomy sexual-hookup network image

I do some work on some of the dynamics packages in statnet (‘tho not the amazing stats part demoed in the post) so its great to have something to point to explain what the project can do. Now we just need to go back and add the timing information to the edges (who was partnered in which episodes) to be able to estimate the number of concurrent partnerships and look at the epidemic-spreading potential of the network…
(via Brian Keegan)

Plane Old Networks

This is a catchall post to collect together a number of interesting network images I’ve run across in the last few years. The common feature is that they are all networks that are based in or arise from geography or spatial processes. Unlike most of the networks we often have to work with, these are mostly “planar” (or nearly so) meaning that they can usually be drawn in two dimensions with minimal crossing and distortion.

The map itself

In The Network Analysis of Urban Streets: a Dual Approach Sergio Porta, Paolo Crucitti and Vito Latora convert city streets to networks and examine some of their properties. Figure 2 of the paper below

The six 1-square mile samples of urban patterns (above) and their primal graphs (below): 1. Ahmedabad; 2. Barcelona; 3. San Francisco; 4. Venezia; 5. Wien; 6. Walnut Creek. Cities are so diverse that, at a first sight, it seems hard to imagine that they share any common — though hidden — pattern, which is what they actually do.

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Adventures with J. P. Morgan and Form 13F

Image of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co's Q42010 security ownership network

Inspired in part by recent work for a client, I finally got around to pulling a long night to play with some Form 13F data from the SEC. This pdf image shows significant ownership relations for J. P. Morgan at the end of 2010. Or at least I think it does. I’d love to hear from anyone who knows more about these types of financial filings.
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Are Your Cookies Colluding?

I recently installed Mozilla’s Collusion add-on for Firefox. It maps out the set of information-sharing relationships between sites as you visit them and they install various 3rd-party-cookies to track your browsing history. Has a neat interactive network viz as a browser plugin where so you can highlight sites you’ve visit and who they reported to.

This image was after a week of low-intensity computer use. Not that surprising to see Google, Facebook and Twitter as very central nodes, tho still impressive to have an image of how many sites report to them. Some sites like quantserve.com I’d at least heard of before, but not some of the other central stats players like 2o7.net or media6degrees.com or imrworldwide.com that appeared lurking in the network.

The visualization seems to be built in SVG using the D3 library’s network code. The interactivity and design are quite lovely, at least for small networks. However, now that I’ve been running Collusion for a month, the graph is quite large and the animation is getting painfully slow and eating my CPU.

NYT Network Narrative

The folks at the New York Times continue to produce awesome data visualisations for their stories. Recently they’ve been splitting production to produce both print (above) and online interactive versions (below) of their figures. This is great, because it makes it possible to design for the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. The interactive version of the the Overview of the Euro Debt Crises viz is also really nice because the the column on the left allows selective hi-lighting of different elments of the network corresponding to various parts of the narrative. And its all in SVG! (via Ronald Rice)

Angels of the Right – version 2.0

I’ve been working for the past several months to build AngelsOfTheRight.net a new interactive version of the conservative philanthropy network data from the Media Matters Conservative Transparency Project and other sources. The idea is to have an atlas where you can dive in, explore, and see which organisations have similar patterns of funding relationships. As always, my hope is to make some of these invisible economic and power relationships a bit more tangible.
Continue reading Angels of the Right – version 2.0