Connected Action

Along with Professors Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) and Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) from the University of Maryland I am writing and editing a book about analyzing the social media networks that form whenever people link or reply to one another, favorite, rate, read, or edit data about other people or their objects.  Social media [...]

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NodeXL has updated again (v.1.0.1.109) with new network metrics.  The application now calculates path length data for your network, reporting the Maximum Geodesic Distance and the Average Geodesic Distance.  The list of overall metrics NodeXL creates includes: Vertices (the number of nodes in the graph), Unique Edges, Edges With Duplicates, Total Edges, Self-Loops (Edges that point back at the node [...]

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NodeXL updated starting with version 1.05 with features that make it fairly easy to create basic “Venn Diagrams”.  A Venn diagram is a familiar way to illustrate the overlap (or lack thereof) of two or more “sets” of things. There are some very amusing Venn diagrams out there!  This one in particular made me laugh [...]

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Network visualizations can be very compelling but they are often a smear of unintelligible nodes and edges without refinement and filtering.  Creating an automated layout for a complex graph is a challenging area of mathematics and computer science.  Several layouts are available and are widely implemented, including the Fruchterman-Reingold layout, the Harel-Koren fast multilevel layout, [...]

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