Reactions: Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks

SocialAction, a system developed by Perer and Shneiderman to analyze relationships between social network has numerous interesting facets. The tool can present data in different ways depending on the relationship the user would like to explore. This method present the user w/ the most intuitive tool for his or her use. The ability to filter out certain amount of data that may obscure the visualization is great for removing non-useful information.

I am interested in seeing how this system performs when a more complicated criterion is required to process the data points. Using the example presented in the paper, I would like to see different terrorist groups, their nationality, and age group all assessed and weighted. If this system can provide an efficient way of representing complicated data like this, it would be extremely useful tool for anyone ranging from market researchers to CEOs to government agencies like the CIA.