Interactively Visualizing Dynamic Social Networks with DySoN Georg Groh Holger Hanstein Wolfgang Wörndl TU München, TU München, TU München, Faculty for Informatics, Faculty for Informatics, Faculty for Informatics, Germany Germany Germany grohg@in.tum.de holger@hanstein.net woerndl@in.tum.de ABSTRACT as the dynamics of relation-type or relation-intensity) is a The dynamic social network visualizer “DySoN” (Dynamic time-averaged view of a faster underlying relational dynam- Social Networks) aims at understanding patterns and struc- ics. For example we might view the intensity of a friendship tural changes in dynamic social networks that evolve over relation which is instantiated in time and space only four time via an interactive visualization approach. times in the last month as less strong in that month com- As an alternative and supplementation to the numerous other pared to a month where the same friendship was instantiated approaches to visualization of social network data and as an eight times. With a more fine granular time view (e.g. weeks attempt to overcome some of the drawbacks of these ap- or days), the four times of seeing your friend may be concen- proaches, DySoN interactively visualizes streaming event trated in a short time interval, e.g. two days, while the rest data of social interactions by an interactive three-dimensional of the month there was no interaction at all, thus yielding model of interpolated NURBS ”tubes”, representing activ- high intensity in these two days and very low intensity for ity and social proximity within a given set of actors during the other 28 days of the month. Thus the different underly- a given time period by using three dimensions of temporal ing time granularities may give rise to the notions of social information mapping: spatial density (tube distance), tube- micro- and macro-dynamics and social micro- and macro- color and tube-diameter. contexts respectively. In that view the social macro-context We use a self assembled large collaboration network of Jazz dynamics is determined by or at least strongly related to the musicians with a straightforward semantics for the computa- the underlying social micro-context(s). tion of relation strengths for the evaluation of the approach. We also discuss applications of the concept for awareness With respect to a rather small time and space granularity, services in mobile peer to peer social networks, which ex- everybody has an idea of such social micro-contexts or dy- hibit a vivid measurable social micro dynamics in time and namic social structures, at least unconsciously, because some space. of the mechanisms that organize mankind into groups and hierarchies can be observed in real life when people form Author Keywords changing patterns with their bodies in time and space while Mobile Dynamic Social Networks, Awareness Services interacting socially. In order to get an abstract view of re- lationships and their instantiations between actors in a so- cial network, one can build upon these ”physical patterns” ACM Classification Keywords which may be measured and modeled mathematically, es- H.5.2 Information Interfaces and Presentation: Miscellane- pecially when considering mobile interaction schemes with ous—Optional sub-category community- or social network platforms [32]. Besides such physical expressions of social relations a wealth of other MOTIVATION & OBJECTIVES highly dynamical features or indicators of social relations Social relations and social structures respectively are clearly exist that may be modeled (see section ). of a dynamical nature. Many dynamical aspects of social relations investigated by social science are rather long term However dynamical the social network model or social con- which is partly due to the properties of the investigation in- text may be: One of the most basic awareness class ser- struments such as questionnaires. In many cases the dy- vice which can be built upon such a dynamic social network namic model of these properties of social relations (such model is a visualization which allows to intuitively recog- nize social distance and group structures. There is a clear demand for methods and software tools, that are able to ana- lyze and visualize the evolution of networks [50, p. 1208ff]. Limited by visual and geometric constraints, a few basic metaphors for temporal or dynamic graphs and networks have been developed so far, including line graphs with sum- mary statistics, series or animations of 2D- or 3D-snapshots, graph overlays, node position tracing and 2,5D or 3D-models Submitted for review to CHI 2009. 1 with a temporal z axis. But the requirements regarding the based on all this previous work) some approaches on dy- aspects of visualization in general once formulated by Bran- namic social network visualization (roughly related to our des [5, p. 7ff] - substance, design and algorithm - can still not approach are e.g. [11, 10, 22, 52, 59, 46] have been pro- be regarded as solved issues and thus still need to be worked posed. We have compiled a more detailed review of the cited on. We aim at proposing a solution to dynamic social net- related work in [35]. work analysis that on the hand maintains the mental map well over time and thus allows a quick overview of the dy- namics of the relations in a set of people (thus avoiding the PARADIGMS & DESIGN RATIONALS clutter of some older approaches) as well as an interactive In order to work towards the the goals defined in section , UI that allows to focus on more specific aspects and analyze we will combine and adapt several existing techniques in a them in more depth. unique way and add some new ideas: Such a method should take the language of social patterns Space-time path We apply Hgerstrand’s “space-time path” mentioned before and carry it forward into the temporal di- principle [33] to social networks. Euclidean distances in the mension, and it should combine the “big picture” with ex- two spatial dimensions are derived from social proximity act metrics of the development of a social network during data which in our Jazz musician network is deduced from a given period of time, following Ben Shneiderman’s “Vi- co-recordings. Similar approaches are used in physics when sual Information-Seeking Mantra”: “Overview first, zoom visualizing world-lines of particles in special relativity the- and filter, then details-on-demand” [55]. Thus such an ap- ory. proach has to be able to adequately mediate between the so- cial macro dynamics and micro dynamics. Force-directed layout Social structures in a given time- slice is visualized by a force-directed layout mechanism, as The main objective of this paper is to discuss such an in- demonstrated for example by Krempel [41] [42] [43], Dekker teractive visualization approach and to verify the suitability [15] and others. We use a modified version of the Frucht- of the technology used and of its visual metaphor by case erman-Reingold algorithm [28], which will be adapted to studies. support our notion of the “crowd” metaphor following [48]. This original metaphor assumes that most activity within The application should allow to inspect structures of social a large group takes place in an inner circle which is sur- networks from the “connectedness perspective”, as defined rounded by the outer fringe with passive people. Important by Brandes [5, p. 33]. It is intended to support awareness in metrics for this arrangement are the diameter of the circle communities and in (mobile) social networks with dynami- and the thickness of the ring, permeability and sharpness of cally changing relations and to give quick visual answers to the borders, and the space between rings, if there are several questions on varying time- (and thus space-)scales like the ones. This crowd metaphor can be assumed to apply to so- following: Which are central, important or prominent actors cial micro-contexts (covering small space-time-”intervals”) and which are peripheral? How does the centrality of actors as well as macro-contexts (covering larger space-time-”in- develop over time? Are there long-lasting partnerships be- tervals”) and although it has been stated for groups, it can tween actors? Are there visible structures in the network? be used to intuitively visualize general social structures or How do structures evolve? How do actor attributes correlate networks. with visible network structures? Stacked graphs The inherent temporal graph structure is in- Proposing convincing approaches as possible solutions to spired by “combined”, “stacked” or “stratified” graph layout these questions would allow a user to effectively analyze a methods as shown by Erten et al. [23] [24] and Dwyer and social environment (e.g. personal or professional) and main- Eades [20] [19] and others. Where time is represented by the tain an overview of the dynamics within such an environ- third dimension of a 3D vizualization. ment. An interesting field of application are e.g. open inno- vation processes in dynamically evolving fields (such as life Mental map We use strategies from dynamic graph draw- sciences) where many actors are involved and such questions ing inspired by solutions described by Branke [8], Diehl et can be asked with respect to e.g. co-invention-activities. al. [17][16] and Brandes [5] to minimize changes between subsequent layouts and to preserve the “mental map” [21] so that the evolution of structures can be followed through RELATED WORK time. preserving the mental map between time slices is one There are various approaches to graph drawing (see [47, 30] of the key problems in dynamic graph visualization. for a good overview) and social network visualization in general (classic examples are e.g. [36, 5, 15, 57, 43, 38, 31, Tube metaphor We introduce the “tube” metaphor, an en- 42]. Furthermore there are also many approaches to visual- hancement of the “worm” metaphor, which was introduced ization of dynamic graphs (related to our work are e.g. [12, by Mathews and Roze [45], and enhanced by Dwyer and 13, 7, 17, 16, 8, 27, 6, 20, 23, 24, 14, 18, 1, 9, 25, 19, 29] Eades [20] [19] and Ware et al. [56] to implement the space- and general time related data (good overview: [2])(related time path. Instead of aggregated cones or simple inter-tem- to our work are especially [45] and (as a general paradigm) poral edges we use tubular shapes extruded from interpola- Hgerstrands space-time-paths [33]) (works that are inspired ted NURBS curves to achieve a better compliance with the by that paradigm: [44, 61, 60, 54, 49])). Furthermore (partly continuity principle of Koffka’s “Gestalt Theory” [40] (cited 2 after [37]). and McFarland [4] [50]. We thus realize a simple way of mediating between social micro- and macro dynamics. For a more fine grained mediation the stack of rules for event aggregation need to be refined further and made adjustable to the specific social domain. Time-line and section view A simplified time-line-based approach is used to show two-dimensional layouts of indi- (a) Stack of weighted (b) Straight intertempo- vidual “frames” or “time-slices”, similar to the “phase plot” graphs. ral edges. mechanism by Bender DeMoll and McFarland [3]. Temporal attribute mapping One network-related attribute can be mapped to the nodes’ spatial coordinates (see above). Two additional syntactic or semantic actor attributes can be mapped to the temporal extension of the tubes, one by a continuous color gradient and the other by radius transition. Similar approaches have already been suggested [19, p. 101]. (c) Interpolated in- (d) Tubular intertempo- tertemporal edges. ral edges. Interactive GUI An interactive, explorative three-dimensi- onal user interface built of a Java3D universe is used, com- Figure 1. 2.5D Graph stack without and with intertemporal edges. bined with a tabular database view and a two-dimensional (Time-Dim.:in z-Direction) graph layout. Interactivity is a crucial feature of dynamic so- cial network visualization since zooming and change of per- spective are necessary in order to complete one’s overview Abstraction from nodes and edges The tube metaphor used of the development of a social structure. For a detailed dis- will abstract completely from graph edges to prevent occlu- cussion of the features of the GUI see [35]. sion, to help focus on the structure and to reveal pure spatio- temporal movement (spatial proximity corresponds to social proximity). Omitting the edges for an increased overview is DEFINITIONS, ASSUMPTIONS & REALIZATION a quite common technique (see e.g. [51]). Our uni-modal dynamic social network model is a temporal multi-graph G(t) = (V, E(t)) with a set of actors V and an undirected, weighted time dependent set of edges E(t) which are known at discrete points in time E(ti ) and are then interpolated. Each G(ti ) is called a time slice. Each pair of nodes can be connected by an arbitrary number of edges. The weights of the edges are normalized to one via wnorm (e) = w(e)/wmax and will be interpreted as ”social proximity” values. Furthermore we assume that every node has a profile which can be modeled as an attribute value pair list. Such node profiles may contain attributes with slow dy- (a) Tube-only display (b) Color mapping namics (such as long term interests, fields of study, name, sex etc.) as well as attributes with fast dynamics (context parameters) such as location, current activity etc. From a more abstract point of view the edges also have a pro- file which contains such elements as the weight of the edge at a given point in time and the history of instantiation events of the underlying social relation over time. Thus the edge weights of a social macro-dynamics perspective are aggre- gated via domain specific rules from social micro-dynamics (specific social events or instantiations of social relations re- spectively). (c) Color and radius mapping It is clear that that there are two main perspectives, which Figure 2. Tube-only model without and with mapping of degree cen- can be applied when analyzing social structures: the view- trality onto temporal axis. point of connectedness (relational view) and the viewpoint of profile (entity view) Brandes’ view [5, p. 32ff]. Continuous-time model Temporal attributes are represented The profile viewpoint is realized in our approach by the con- by a simplified continuous-time model, where social events cept that two real valued attributes (if existing) can be addi- are aggregated according to rules, similar to (but admittedly tionally visualized in our ”‘tube-only” model via color and not as flexible as) the model suggested by Bender DeMoll radius of the tubes. The connectedness perspective is at- 3 tributed in our approach through the weight of the edges, Fruchterman-Reingold application for the next slice at ti+1 . which corresponds to social proximity. There are numerous Other algorithms like Kamada and Kawai [39], would be less approaches in literature for computing social proximity, for suited for us because of their usage of the graph-theoretical example either by considering the number of different paths path distance. While Kamada-Kawai is in fact in use for between two actors [34, ch. 7, p. 9], from the calculation of social network visualization in some applications, the path geodesic path length[34, ch. 7, p. 14] or as a combination of, length between two nodes is less obvious to interpret that e.g., weighted adjacency and geodesic distance [15]. the weight of the individual relation. We assume that the ap- The current version of DySoN assumes that the edge weights plication domain for a dynamic social network visualization (w(e(ti )) (in the sense of a social macro-context) are be implies a highly directly connected social network where computed by accumulating social events (in the sense of a two nodes are very likely to be directly connected. social micro-context) that take place in [ti−1 , ti ] involving In order to further preserve the mental map, we assume that a the adjacent actors {vl , vm } of e. We assume that these node should remain at it is current position as far as possible events are situative instantiations of longer lasting social re- if its degree does not change substantially, so we introduce lations. Naturally, as has been discussed before, the domain an additional attractive force from the nodes position dur- of application dictates what a good distinction between the ing the FR-run to its position in the previous time slice with social micro context (social ”events”) and the social macro- a strength proportional to its degree change. Using relative context (longer lasting social relations) should be. The nest- weight changes instead of degree changes (weights drop to / ing of social dynamic tiers can be broken down to very fine raise from zero) would be another possibility. space and time granularities: E.g. from a precise modeling of single communication acts between two people on a party The original FR algorithm uses a ”spring-paradigm” between as elementary events of micro-context, continuing with a tier nodes to compute a suitable layout, which uses a repulsive that aggregated the events from the previous layer and views force fr = −k 2 /δ and an attractive force fa = δ 2 /k be- the event of visiting the party alongside the events of visit- tween two nodes, where δ is the euclidean distance between ing the zoo together two days later as elementary events and them and k (being roughly analogous to the spring constant finally a layer that aggregates these events over a month and or ”natural length of the spring” is a simple function of the views months of intense interaction as elementary events. visualization canvas dimensions w and h and some experi- Each tier (coarser time / space granularity) aggregates re- mental constant c). The forces are directed along the vec- lation instantiations (events) from a lower tier (finer time / tor from node one to node two. We modify the original space granularity). approach by several means. First we introduce our edge The investigation of this type of modeling is subject to cur- weights by proportionally strengthening the attractive force rent research of one of the authors. We aim at investigating fa0 = fa ∗ w(e). The second modification introduces an the modeling assumption that the intensity and other aspects additional attractive gravitational force (inspired by [26]) to of higher tier relations can be readily deduced from the prop- the center of the slice canvas. This accounts for the effect erties of lower tier relation events. occurring with pure FR, that isolated nodes are pushed to the canvas borders by the lack of attractive force. In order It is possible to substitute social proximity with (profile- to emphasize the impact of centrality, our additional attrac- )similarity depending on the application domain. Analo- tive gravitational force is fg = δ 2 ∗ (deg(v) + d)/k where gous to the nesting of social proximity with respect to time deg(v) is the degree of v, δ its distance to the center and d and space granularity (social micro- / macro-context) one an additional steering parameter. can use for the similarity calculation profile parameters with high dynamics (such as current micro-location) or averaged The complexity of the original FR algorithm has been stated variants of these (e.g. coarse area of usual ”residence”). as Θ(|V |2 + |E|) [28, p. 1138] and our complete layout al- Again as in the case of relational dynamics we assume that gorithm can be shown [35] to have an overall complexity of the macro-tier contains averages of the next lower micro- O(|V |2 s) where s is the number of time slices. So our mod- tier. Some Profile elements with very slow dynamics (such ifications to not add substantially to the overall time com- as name) that are not averaged versions of related profile el- plexity. It may be worthwile to study the effects of intro- ements with higher dynamics are often less useful for simi- ducing node ”inertia” for mental map preservance and using larity calculations. the result layout from the previous time slice as the starting layout for the modified FR algorithm in the current layout One of the main goals for the relative layout of the planar with respect to the number of iterations it takes the modi- graphs corresponding to each time slice is that the layout of fied FR-Algorithm to converge in each time slice. One can consecutive time slices is supposed to preserve the ”‘men- expect a substantially decreased number of iterations, since tal map” [21] as much as possible. This paradigm inter- we start from a ”good previous solution” and limit the ”node feres with mapping the social distances as exactly as pos- mobility”. sible. We solve these conflicting demands by using a modi- fied Fruchterman-Rheingold [28] (FR) layout algorithm for Having computed the positions of each node in each time each slice as a compromise, also because it is easy to adapt slice, these points have to be interpolated with a suitable to our purposes (edge weights as measures of social prox- smooth curve (∈ C 2 (see [58] for an easy motivation)) which imity). We furthermore use the standard approach of us- is the center of the tube for that particular node (actor). We ing the resulting layout of slice ti as initial layout for the evaluated interpolation polynomials, Bezier curves and sim- 4 Figure 3. Decay of the Miles Davis Band in the early seventies. ple B-splines for the purpose and found severe drawbacks for contributions for a given time slice is the domain specific each [35] and arrived at NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B- heuristic rule, which connects social micro-dynamics (bro- Splines) [53] of degree 3 as the best choice for our problem. ken down to individual instantiations of social ”co-recording” See [35] on how we compute knot points and control points relations) and macro-dynamics (e.g. when applying a time or these curves. We then build our tube surfaces as cylindri- slice of one year. Depending on the domain of interest these cal NURBS surfaces around the interpolation curves. rules need to be adapted. Concerning the ”profile” dimensions color and radius we We made substantial efforts to avoid counting re-releases. chose (for the current prototype) to visualize node degree The color corresponds to the node degree as explained be- with color and radius, because n our paradigm the edges are fore and the tube radius is also set to reflect the node degree missing completely. The color paradigm is to chose ”hot to support the color coding. colors for (nodes) tubes with a high node degree (these are perceived to be ”socially active” in the given time slice) and Figure 3, for example, depicts the breakup of a band which also to give them larger radii the more connected they are. played together for some years. The involved musicians all [35] describes the details of these calculations. started solo careers and their own band projects after one successful key recording with the band leader. You see the effect that tubes are crossing here, though the clique has not STUDY: THE JAZZ-NETWORK changed, which has to be addressed by improving the incre- As a first step to verify the suitability of the approach we col- mental layout algorithm. lected an extensive dataset on musical collaborations in Jazz Figure 4 shows an actor, who has been central for some years and checked from our own pre-existing knowledge of the before relations to the other participating actors break. This Jazz-scene whether the tool was able to fulfill the goals. We happened due to a couple of solo recordings, which do not crawled on of the numerous publicly available, Wiki-style provide the actor with high centrality. (socially crafted) discography data-base Discogs (www.dis- Our findings with several other examples were, that the sys- cogs.com) with a snowball approach [34] and substituted tem was able to meaningfully visualize phenomena in the missing biographical data of the musicians by a supplemen- Jazz scene over the last decades. A further evaluation would tal crawling process of Wikipedia. This resulted in 96798 have to empirically manifest this claim by doing an exten- musicians who played on 224173 tracks on 37773 albums. sive study with a set of Jazz experts. Thus the resulting social network is in fact a two mode net- Future research will also investigate the assumption that the work (mode one: musicians, mode two: albums). Each mu- system’s basic design metaphors are also suitable for the sical co-contribution of two musicians for a track is viewed vizualization of social relations on a shorter time scale (e.g. as an event and accumulated to the temporal weight of the as part of awareness services in mobile social network appli- respective edge in the respective time slice. Adding up these 5 Figure 4. Actor with period of high degree centrality. cations). glect a fine grained dynamic social network model and, in general, the user has to take care for himself about modeling UI/PARAMETERS OF THE CURRENT DYSON APPLICA- his social relations. Truly mobile social network models and services which are socially sensitive as well as context sensi- TION tive will allow for semi-automatic detection and modeling of Besides several mainteneance UI elements (e.g. for manip- social relations on all time / space scales (the social micro- ulation the actor set), DySoN allows to interactively control and macro-contexts) and will make intimate use of the re- and manipulate the visualization in order to analyze certain sulting ”multi-dynamic” social network. A possible service details. The user can turn and zoom the visualization in sev- could be e.g. a ”socio-context-cast” communication service eral ways. Furthermore the geometry of the tubes can be that allows to publish messages to certain combined social manipulated by e.g. setting the overall tube diameter (e.g. and physical contexts (”Send a message to all persons that depending on the number of actors). Lighting and color attended Jim’s party yesterday”). models can also be adjusted: E.g. Degree Transparency is Because of the highly dynamic nature of social micro-contexts, one approach to improve the readability of the model (es- it is not reasonable to assume that continuously uploading pecially those with high numbers of actors and thus a high such information to a central social networking platform is density of tubes) by making those parts of the tubes trans- reasonable. Furthermore the more fine grained the collected parent, that represent a time period with a degree of less than social information is, the more pressing are the privacy is- the value set by the Threshold slider. The amount of trans- sues connected with an unconstrained publication of such parency can be adjusted by the Opacity slider. Furthermore data. Instead of such an Orwellian central platform, one the user can interactively determine the profile parameters would switch to a decentralized social networking paradigm that are mapped to the radius and color temperature. such as NoseRub. There a lot of other parameters which can be adjusted. See Clearly, awareness services are one of the key features of [35] for details. such a mobile P2P style social networking framework. DySoN can be used to visualize either social proximity (”what’s the APPLICATION OF DYSON AS AWARENESS SERVICE EL- (micro-/meso-/macro-dynamics of my ‘friendship’ relations?”) EMENT IN MOBILE P2P SOCIAL NETWORKS or social similarity (e.g. co-locatedness (”who is in my vicin- Existing social network platforms such as Facebook often ity?”)) on all time scales. are mainly focused on long term social relations, thus at the In order to do that, we have to work on heuristics that ag- social macro-context. What is happening on a finer time gregate the events on the micro-scale into social relationship scale (except for some aspects such as Online-awareness etc) strengths (or proximity values) on the next higher level. is only covered by some platforms such as Twitter. But these platforms often tend to focus on the individual user and ne- 6 SUMMARY, DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Hypertext We discussed a novel method to visualize dynamic social and hypermedia: returning to our diverse roots, pages networks. A case study of collaborating Jazz musicians re- 51–60, 1999. vealed that the approach indeed matches the goals that were formulated in section . On a more general level an empiri- 11. C. Chen and L. Carr. Visualizing the evolution of a cal user study would have to be conducted. Since it is very subject domain: a case study. 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