Analysis and Visualization of Social Networks

We describe visone, a tool that facilitates the visual exploration of social networks. Social network analysis is a methodological approach in the social sciences using graph-theoretic concepts to describe, understand and explain social structure. The visone software is an attempt to integrate analysis and visualization of social networks and is intended to be used in research and teaching. While we are primarily focussing on users in the social sciences, several features provided in the tool will be useful in

other flelds as well. In contrast to more conventional mathematical software in the social sci- ences that aim at providing a comprehensive suite of analytical options, our emphasisison complementing every option we provide with tailored means of graphical interaction. We attempt to make complicated types of analysis and data handling transparent, intuitive, and more readily accessible. User feed- back indicates that many who usually regard data exploration and analysis complicated and unnerving enjoy the playful nature of visual interaction. Consequently, much of the tool is about graph drawing methods speciflcally adapted to facilitate visual data exploration. The origins of visone lie in an interdisciplinary cooperation with researchers from political science which resulted in innovative uses of graph drawing methods for social network visualization, and prototypical implementations thereof. With the growing demand for access to these methods, we started implementing an integrated tool for public use. It should be stressed, however, that visone remains a research platform and testbed for innovative methods, and is not intended to become ? Many people have contributed directly or indirectly to the current state of our tool. We thank Sabine Cornelsen, Patrick Kenis, J˜org Raab, and Volker Schneider for many years of fruitful cooperation, and the participants of POLNET summer schools for their feedback and suggestions. We are indebted to Michael Baur, Marc Benkert, Marco Gaertler, Boris K˜opf, and J˜urgen Lerner for their implementation efiorts, and gratefully acknowledge flnancial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant BR 2158/1-1 and the Eu- ropean Commission within FET Open Project COSIN (IST-2001-33555). c visone logos by Christiane N˜ostlinger and Ulrik Brandes. 2 Ulrik Brandes and Dorothea Wagner a standard tool with all due consequences such as extensive user-support and product marketing. Essentially all components are in development and therefore subject to change. In a nutshell, visone is a † tool for interactive analysis and visualization of networks, in which † originality is preferred over comprehensiveness, and that † caters especially to social scientists. The organization of the subsequent sections follows the common structure of all chapters in this book. In particular, we start with background information on the main area of application for visone, and give application examples in Section 5. While other interesting algorithms have been implemented, Section 3 focusses on those for graph drawing. 2 Applications Thema ina pplication area of visone isamethodologicalapproachinthesocial sciences: Social Network Analysis uses graph-theoretic concepts to describe, understand and explain, sometimes even predict or design, social structure. The objects of interest are emergent patterns of relationships and their in-...

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