Category Archives: time-based network data

CorpWatch API lauch!

For the past several months, Greg and I have been working on project to scrape corporate subsidiary ownership relations from Securities Exchange Commission filings. The first part of the project launched today! So now you can pull down company names and relationships for more than 200,000 publicly traded U.S. corporations and their subsidiaries from http://api.corpwatch.org. If writing code is not your thing, we also built an interactive browser for the data at http://croctail.corpwatch.org.

croctail_screenshot
Continue reading CorpWatch API lauch!

Oilmoney Redux

The main conference on Social Network Analysis was is in San Diego this year, so I decided to make a trip down. Was nice to step away from the screen and see old and new faces from the far-flung research community. Amusingly, the conference landed in the middle of spring break celebrations, so there were bearded academics wandering geekily around in crowds of drunken sunburnt 20-something revelers.

prezoilmoney movie placeholderI gave a presentation at the very tail end of the conference to demonstrate some features of the oilmoney website—including a presidential contribution movie, and bit of analysis on the data. Much of this will be familiar to anyone who has read these earlier posts, but the stat stuff is new.
Warning: the rest of this post is pretty geeky, read at your own risk ;-)

Continue reading Oilmoney Redux

Organic Brand Ownership Networks

organicNetworkCloseup
A friend of mine recently found a map of ownership relationships in the organic food industry pinned up in a neighbor’s kitchen. A bit of searching led us to Phil Howard‘s work tracking the growth and mergers of companies and brands. He kindly shared his data with me so we could use SoNIA to make a network animation showing major brand introductions and ownership relations from 1995 to 2007.
Continue reading Organic Brand Ownership Networks

Heavy SoNIA movie in the New York Times

..although in a minor supporting role ;-)
thumbnail of obesity movieJames Fowler used the SoNIA software to create an animated movie of the core of the social network in the Framingham Heart Study as part of a paper that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine last week.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years (NEJM)

The story (that heavy people have heavy social contacts) has been all over the media and showed up in the Health section of the Paper of Record. Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends

[original in high quality .mov format w/o voice over]
It is a good nudge to me to get the newer version of SoNIA released. One criticism I have of the animation is that the multiple components of the network are overlapping, making it difficult to see the structure well. Some of the newer features funded by the CSDE help with this, but at the cost of a much longer running time to compute the movie.

API access to US state political funding data

MoneyInStatePoliticsLogoThe National Institute on Money in State Politics now provides a service where users can submit queries and download data in xml format. The documentation for the service (which requires setting up an account login) is here.

They also include services for generating various graphic reports including a Political Contribution Logorithmic Scatterplot Profile with interactive javascript inspection of candidates.

StatePoliticsPULSEChart

I did quick cut-and-paste from another site which uses thier data, and was able to generate network maps of the top tend funders for a few california candidates. But with access to the full DB via the API, it is possible to do much more sophisticated maps and even animations – for most states they have data going back several years.

CaliContributions