Category Archives: network viz

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.

MAPLight takes on congress

maplight video tour

This month Berkley-based non-profit MAPLight.org expanded their coverage of the relationships between interest groups, legislators and votes to include data for US Congress.

MAPLight.org for Congress combines all campaign contributions to U.S. legislators with legislators’ votes on every bill, using official records from the Library of Congress web site and the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org). The resulting database of bills, voting records, and campaign contributions powers the search engine at MAPLight.org and enables people to see the links between dollars spent and votes cast in Washington D.C. [maplight press release]

Maplight is doing some serious legwork to augment the CRP data with industry positions on bills. They are also doing neat things with timelines so that the user can get a better idea of the relations between donations and key votes.

I took a quick stab at creating a network from some of their example California data on a Bottled Water Bill

Place holder for network map of bottle bill

Continue reading MAPLight takes on congress

Unfluence Project Launched!

UnfluenceLogo
Greg Michalec and I just launched a website that allows users to interactively explore political contribution data as a network map. We won first prize in the Sunlight Foundation Mashup competition! Try your own query at http://unfluence.net/

UnfluenceExampleSmall
This was done as an entry in the Sunlight Foundations Mashup Contest. Cross your fingers that we win and get some resources to continue the project! ;-)
Continue reading Unfluence Project Launched!

Political Network Datamining

Its not what they say during the campaign that counts…

..its what they do in office. The nice thing about politicians is, a lot of what they do is a matter of public record, increasingly available on the internet for free. Wouldn’t it be great if ordinary people had the tools to make this political landscape visible?

I’m posting here some examples I’ve come across of intriguing maps and representations of political data. Mostly these fall under the broad heading of “mapping congress” based on data available from the THOMAS db of congressional record.

Committee Interlocks

I found a nice preprint in arXiv that explores the hierarchical relationships formed by the pattern of overlap of Representatives in committees:

commStructFig2Larger
Continue reading Political Network Datamining

Extraction, Visualization & Analysis of Corporate Inter-Relationships

Interesting project EVA with goal of creating a semi-automated system for parsing and extracting corporate relationships from SEC 10-K filings, ‘tho they did use some existing ownership dbs as well. Software uses a nice technique of identifying paragraphs likely to contain owership information and presenting to user for verification. Seems that much of the work was done in 2001, I can’t tell if it is an ongoing project.
Continue reading Extraction, Visualization & Analysis of Corporate Inter-Relationships

Mapping Congress

It is still very rough, but I’ve been having a very interesting time looking at contributions among PACs in FEC Data. This image shows transactions to Senate candidate’s central committes that were reported in May of 2006. Colors by party, grey is unkown / unspecified. Labels are on candidate’s committes, but some are violently truncated. Names of PACs have been removed to protect the guilty (actually because they are too long and make the graph cluttered)
senatePacsMay2006

They layouts are not converging very well, so the structure is not that accurate. This is also only showing one month’s data, so not very representative. But need much more specific queries and good aggregation rules to deal with longer time periods. Easy to imagine making it interactive, zoomable, animating the time data, adding to SNA metrics, etc. A long ways to go to build software to do this, but I’m excited to have something to show!

Newbie’s view of a Network

I started poking around in omidyar.net a few days ago, curious if it can be a resource for locating activist techs and funding. As I’m not really a member of any of the “social networking” sites, I don’t really have a sense of the social protocol. It is kind of like stepping blind into a cocktail party. A few people immediatly contacted me, but I didn’t know who they were other than by reading their profiles. So I got curious about the structure of communication of the site. After a day or so of coding with a little help from carnivore, htmlparser and sonia, I’ve got a few pictures of the network of positive feedback on comments. (people have the ability to give points to eachother’s posts in the fourms, kinda like slashdot)
snapshot of newbie's view of omidyar feedback network

Continue reading Newbie’s view of a Network