Comment Flow

Social networks are abstract organizational structures that help us understand the relationships among a group of interconnected individuals. Much recent research has focused on understanding the structure of these networks. Yet the network itself is a conceptual topology. The key is the activity that flows along the network paths: the support offered, the information given, the gossip exchanged.

Our goal in this research is to develop ways of representing social networks that embody the individuality of the nodes and links. By incorporating this information, we can advance our understanding of the social dynamics of the network, including the roles of the individual members and the temporal changes in the network structure. We have designed and implemented a flexible
tool for the content driven exploration and visualization of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout, our system shows the activity and the information exchange between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account.This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.