Curiosity about the “shape” of social structure is one of the main factors that got me involved in network visualization in the first place. How “clumpy” and “clique-y” are the patterns of social contacts around me? Continue reading What does social structure look like?
Well shoot, I guess it is publication week! The special issue of the Journal of Statistical Software about the statnet package for advanced network statistics has finally been released. It is great to see the years of hard work from everyone on the statnet team finally in print! I did some work for the project to hook up the package with SoNIA software to create movies from output of statistical models of dynamic networks of disease transmission. One of the articles in the issue documents the process and includes some example movies:
Skye Bender-deMoll, Martina Morris, James Moody (2008) “Prototype Packages for Managing and Animating Longitudinal Network Data: dynamicnetwork and rSoNIA” Journal of Statistical Software. Vol. 24, Issue 7.
One of the exciting things for me about the project was exploring ways to display time, connectivity, and transmission simultaneously. An example of one of the movies demonstrating the effects of varying levels of “concurrent partnerships” on the paths of transmission of simulated “infection”: (70mb quicktime movie). In the last few frames of the movie, the perspective shifts to show a timeline image of the infection “trees” in occurring in the simulated network.
In the tree image (created by James Moody) time advances vertically down the page, so the seed nodes for each infection appear at the top and the “depth” of the tree indicates the time step of the infection. The color of each edge indicates the concurrency status of the corresponding relationship when the transmission occurred.
[NOTE: as of 2013, AAAS network mapping is offline, links have been altered to point to Internet Archive versions]
Well, its several months overdue, but I finally finished my report to the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program on network analysis and mapping. The goal was to give a non-academic introduction to network concepts and related fields, survey some relevant academic and humanitarian projects, and make some proposals.
Potential Human Rights Uses of Network Analysis and Mapping:
A report to the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (pdf, 47p)
The report also includes a number of visual examples (thanks to the authors for allowing me to include samples of their work). Also thanks to the members of the SOCNET listserv for recommendations. It was really great to have an opportunity to discover what work is being done, and dig up interesting data sets and applications (see grassroots network mapping, I’ll post others as well). At the same time, I’m sure there are a number of worthy and relevant projects that I have overlooked, so please contact me or SHRP with more examples.
One lovely network visualization included was this above. It shows warm-up exercise for participants in a network mapping workshop for a Colombian farmer collective. Colored wool was used to represent the various communication paths by which participants received invitations to the workshop. (From B. Douthwaite, A. Carvajal, S. Alvarez, E. Claros, and L.A. Hernández. “Building farmers’ capacities for networking (Part I): Strengthening rural groups in Colombia through network analysis.” Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 2(2), 2006.
Well, it has not been officially launched yet, but the oil company campaign contribution site we’ve been working on for the last six months is live. It leaked out on blogs this week, and has been getting good reviews and tons of traffic. We are excited! The site is a project of Oil Change International and another collaboration between myself and Greg Michalec. It shows interactive network maps of campaign contributions to presidential races and members of congress. The same data is also shown in drillable tables, so you can go from a politician, to the contributing oil companies, all the way to the image of the original FEC filing. It also permits searching for congress members by name and constituent zip code.
I’m working on a project for AAAS’s Science and Human Rights Program to identify some possibilities for human rights uses of networks and network visualization. In the process of doing a quick web review of existing work, I located a couple of interesting examples of people using networks as a grassroots tool to help stakeholders develop analysis of the power networks they are embedded in as a strategy tool. Also great to see such a low-tech solution.
Continue reading Grassroots network mapping
I found an interesting Chevron advertisement inside the back cover of the July 2007 issue of Harper’s magazine. Captioned “There are 193 countries in the world. None of them are energy independent.” it depicts an open notebook with clippings of a number of graphics and charts showing information about energy interdependence.
Continue reading Oil Networks, Advertising, Imaginary Data?
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
..although in a minor supporting role ;-)
James 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.
A few months ago Dan McFarland and Jim Moody asked me to create a movie showcasing some of the work done in SoNIA as submission to the netsci06 visualization contest. We didn’t win, but here it is any way for your viewing pleasure.
Continue reading Moving with Meaning Movie
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
