Interactive visualization of dynamic social networks

Understanding patterns and structural changes in an evolving social network at first glance and performing hands-on exploration of actors' relationships and attributes are the primary goals of the dynamic social network visualizer "DySoN" (Dynamic Social Networks) presented in this work. A lot of work has been done over the past few years to find visual metaphors for changes in network structures, partly showing how streaming event data of social interactions could be visualized by an interactive three-dimensional model of interpolated "tubes", representing dynamic social proximity within a given set of actors during a given time period by using three dimensions of temporal information mapping: spatial density, color and size. Using the example of a collaboration network of musicians, "DySoN" takes event data and additional actor attributes from a relational database, calculates a virtual socio-matrix with proximity relations from it, builds a temporal graph object, applies a force-directed graph layout method and constructs a NURBS model which is then displayed as Java3D geometry, complemented by a two-dimensional section view and a filterable table view of actors and attributes.