Interactive Visualization of Dynamic Social Networks

Abstract

Understanding patterns and structural changes in an evolving social net- work at first glance and performing hands-on exploration of actors’ relationships and attributes are the primary goals of the dynamic social network visualizer “DySoN” (Dynamic Social Networks) presented in this work. A lot of work has been done over the past few years to find visual metaphors for changes in network structures, partly showing how streaming event data of social inter- actions could be visualized by an interactive three-dimensional model of interpolated ”tubes”, representing dynamic social proximity within a given set of actors during a given time period by using three dimensions of temporal information mapping: spatial density, color and size. Using the example of a collaboration network of musicians, “DySoN” takes event data and additional actor attributes from a relational database, calculates a virtual socio-matrix with proximity relations from it, builds a temporal graph object, applies a force-directed graph layout method and constructs a NURBS model which is then displayed as Java3D geometry, complemented by a two-dimensional section view and a filterable table view of actors and attributes.