Some tips on how to simplify a hairball network diagram using social network stats, especially in Gephi (or NetworkX).

1. Simplifying Social Network Visualizations Lynn Cherny, Ph.D.

2. Why Care? Network (data) is everywhere now… 1. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

3. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC A social network is a social structuremade up of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. [--Wikipedia] Postdoc at Indiana University ad: “Areas of focus will include information diffusion patterns, epidemic models for the spread of ideas, interactions between network traffic and structure dynamics, and agent-based models to explain the emergence of viral bursts of attention.

4. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC And then Moritz Stefaner posted this during the summer…

5. How can we untangle the hairball? Using social network analysis metrics and filtering the data set… Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

6. Tools I Used Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC (free) R (free) Python (NetworkX) (free) Gephi (www.gephi.org) Tableau Desktop Excel Illustrator and Photoshop

7. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC Gephi – Network vis and analysis Statistics Tab Color -By… Graph Preview Layout Method Filter Rules

8. Calculate Stats (Gephi and NetworkX) Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

9. Some Important Stats – Degree, Authority, Betweenness… Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

10. R – find correlations among stats Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

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13. Betweenness Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC A measure of connectedness between (sub)components of the graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

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15. Use “Degree” to scale size of node label in Gephi… still a mess! Not enough yet. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

16. Detecting Sub-Communities-and then filtering. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

17. Community Detection Algorithms Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC Louvain method, implemented in both Gephi and NetworkX Outputs a classification for each node in the list – 1, 2, 3… corresponding to the “community” they are closest to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Network_Community_Structure.png

18. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC

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20. Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC “The Authorities” “The Researchers”

21. Summary Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC You can go from a hairball to an analysis… With free tools (plus some standards or extras to make the results pretty) Network analysis is another form of data literacy now – think of these methods as similar to other stats, but specific to graphs.

22. Lynn Cherny, Ph.D.lynn@ghostweather.com Lynn Cherny, Ghostweather R&D LLC Need data help? Have a hairball? Contact me. See my blog post on this for more info and links: http://blogger.ghostweather.com/