Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Reaction: Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks

This paper focuses on the analysis and visualization of the social networks which in itself very challenging task. The author presents a tool SocialAction which systematically analyses the networks for attributes, measures and rankings.
SocialAction provides some excellent features like ranking of attributes and co-ordinated views. These features when combined with visualization techniques give good overview and understanding of anatomy of network compared to other traditional methods. The co-ordinated views approach allows us to represent some complicated relations. The tool allows users to rank and filter by nodes or attributes. Scatter plots can be used for comparison. Subgrouping and multiplex ranking are two great features provided by SocialAction. Subgrouping simplifies the network analysis and allows user to focus on the area of Interest. Multiplex Ranking also allows user to focus on the area of Interest, since it allows user to filter the display as per the temporal characteristics.
Overall, this paper is a good read for SNA and SocialAction appears to be a great tool which effectively uses the visualization techniques for SNA.

0 comments: