July 16th, 2009
Categories: Applications, MS / PhD Thesis, Software, User Groups, Visualization
The field of social network analysis has witnessed an unprecedented growth during the past few years. Its techniques have been used by a variety of scientific fields including epidemiology, ecology, and conservation. Social network analysts have also began to incorporate time into their models producing a new class of networks known as dynamic social networks. Although there are a number of well established techniques for visualizing classical static networks,these techniques suffer from limitations when applied to dynamic networks that change with time. In this thesis, I propose SocioScape, an interactive tool for the visual exploration of spatially referenced, dynamic social networks. The tool combines a novel visual representation methodology that illustrates the evolution of social groups with a spatio-temporal visualization showing the movement of these groups in the physical environment. The visual depictions used in SocioScape provide an alternative to graphs, allowing domain scientists to easily explore the evolution of the social structure and examine the role of the external environmental factors in shaping the social behavior of populations.
The primary contributions of this thesis include: