https://devsummit.aspirationtech.org/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Writing_Code_to_Visualize_NetworksWriting Code to Visualize Networks - Revision history2026-04-12T22:06:25ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.35.1https://devsummit.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Writing_Code_to_Visualize_Networks&diff=473&oldid=prevVivian: 1 revision imported2015-05-05T18:25:08Z<p>1 revision imported</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>== How to visualize relational data - a (great) talk by Skye Bender-deMoll ==<br />
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'''Social graphs'''<br />
-- nodes and edges<br />
-- store the relationships between them<br />
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Explosion of tools for visualizing social graphs.<br />
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Can extract non-obvious information from looking at how people connect.<br />
-- Example, can figure out how people cluster into groups, social structures<br />
-- See how your base is connected and clustered and segmented<br />
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=== Great examples: ===<br />
'''<br />
Touchgraph.net - TouchGraph photos'''<br />
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'''Sawmill strike example'''<br />
-- Figured out who were the nodes -- who you need to talk to convince the others.<br />
-- but really easy to distort the data -- we don't have good visual literacy around data visualization<br />
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'''Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy'''<br />
http://www.orgnet.com/slumlords.html <br />
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[Another time, talk about data cleaning tools, data normalization tools]<br />
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You can pull link organizational data out of Facebook via API.<br />
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Otherwise collecting data is very hard and expensive<br />
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Skye walked us through the current state of tools, referencing http://skyeome.net/projects/networkChart/comparison.html<br />
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Then he showed examples of data visualization used to tell stories.<br />
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=== Good examples ===<br />
<br />
Prop 23 dirty oil - http://prop23.dirtyenergymoney.com/<br />
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Conservative foundations<br />
styrotopia.net/~unfluence/rightwing or <br />
http://angelsoftheright.net/<br />
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Then Skye discussed an open source project he has just started for embedding interactive network diagrams on a web page.<br />
nodeviz on code.google.com/p/nodeviz<br />
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Then we had a good discussion on Data Visualization.<br />
At the end of the day, still requires humans to make sense of the data, figure out what attributes mean, which are most important.<br />
Sometimes you want to tell the story, sometimes you want to just let people explore the data in a guided way, sometime you want to tell a story and allow people to verify the data underneath the story.<br />
Data visualization vs. data exploration vs guided tour of the data<br />
-- and being able to show the data.</div>Vivian