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2007b) The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in World of Warcraft
- In: SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems
, 2007
"... ABSTRACT Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) can be fascinating laboratories to observe group dynamics online. In particular, players must form persistent associations or "guilds" to coordinate their actions and accomplish the games' toughest objectives. Managing a guild, howe ..."
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Cited by 58 (6 self)
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ABSTRACT Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) can be fascinating laboratories to observe group dynamics online. In particular, players must form persistent associations or "guilds" to coordinate their actions and accomplish the games' toughest objectives. Managing a guild, however, is notoriously difficult and many do not survive very long. In this paper, we examine some of the factors that could explain the success or failure of a game guild based on more than a year of data collected from five World of Warcraft servers. Our focus is on structural properties of these groups, as represented by their social networks and other variables. We use this data to discuss what games can teach us about group dynamics online and, in particular, what tools and techniques could be used to better support gaming communities.
Online Dynamic Graph Drawing
"... This paper presents an algorithm for drawing a sequence of graphs online. The algorithm strives to maintain the global structure of the graph and thus the user’s mental map, while allowing arbitrary modifications between consecutive layouts. The algorithm works online and uses various execution cu ..."
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Cited by 51 (1 self)
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This paper presents an algorithm for drawing a sequence of graphs online. The algorithm strives to maintain the global structure of the graph and thus the user’s mental map, while allowing arbitrary modifications between consecutive layouts. The algorithm works online and uses various execution culling methods in order to reduce the layout time and handle large dynamic graphs. Techniques for representing graphs on the GPU allow a speedup by a factor of up to 17 compared to the CPU implementation. The scalability of the algorithm across GPU generations is demonstrated. Applications of the algorithm to the visualization of discussion threads in Internet sites and to the visualization of social networks are provided.
Dynamic animations of journal maps: Indicators of structural change and interdisciplinary developments.
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
, 2008
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Visual Analysis of Dynamic Group Membership in Temporal Social Networks
"... C-Group is a tool for analyzing dynamic group membership in temporal social networks over time. Unlike most network visualization tools, which show the group structure within an entire network, or the group membership for a single actor, C-Group allows users to focus their analysis on a pair of indi ..."
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Cited by 18 (1 self)
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C-Group is a tool for analyzing dynamic group membership in temporal social networks over time. Unlike most network visualization tools, which show the group structure within an entire network, or the group membership for a single actor, C-Group allows users to focus their analysis on a pair of individuals. While C-Group allows for viewing the addition and deletion of nodes (actors) and edges (relationships) over time, its major contribution is its focus on changing group memberships over time. By doing so, users can investigate the context of temporal group memberships for the pair. C-Group provides users with a flexible interface for defining (and redefining) groups interactively, and supports two novel visual representations of the evolving group memberships. This flexibility gives users alternate views that are appropriate for different network sizes and provides users with different insights into the grouping behavior. We demonstrate the utility of the tool on a scientific publication network.
A Task Taxonomy of Network Evolution Analysis
"... Abstract—Visualization is a useful tool for understanding the nature of networks. The recent growth of social media requires more powerful visualization techniques beyond static network diagrams. One of the most important challenges is the visualization of temporal network evolution. In order to pro ..."
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Cited by 15 (3 self)
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Abstract—Visualization is a useful tool for understanding the nature of networks. The recent growth of social media requires more powerful visualization techniques beyond static network diagrams. One of the most important challenges is the visualization of temporal network evolution. In order to provide strong temporal visualization methods, we need to understand what tasks users accomplish. This study provides a taxonomy of the temporal network visualization tasks. We identify (1) the entities, (2) the properties to be visualized, and (3) the hierarchy of temporal features, which were extracted by surveying existing temporal network visualization systems. By building and examining the task taxonomy, we report which tasks have been covered so far and suggest additions for designing the future visualizations. We also present example visualizations constructed using the task taxonomy for a social networking site in order to validate the quality of the taxonomy. Index Terms—Network visualization, temporal evolution, task taxonomy, design space 1
Visualizing the evolution of community structures in dynamic social networks
- Computer Graphics Forum
"... Social network analysis is the study of patterns of interaction between social entities. The field is attracting increasing attention from diverse disciplines including sociology, epidemiology, and behavioral ecology. An important sociological phenomenon that draws the attention of analysts is the e ..."
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Cited by 14 (0 self)
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Social network analysis is the study of patterns of interaction between social entities. The field is attracting increasing attention from diverse disciplines including sociology, epidemiology, and behavioral ecology. An important sociological phenomenon that draws the attention of analysts is the emergence of communities, which tend to form, evolve, and dissolve gradually over a period of time. Understanding this evolution is crucial to sociologists and domain scientists, and often leads to a better appreciation of the social system under study. Therefore, it is imperative that social network visualization tools support this task. While graph-based representations are well suited for investigating structural properties of networks at a single point in time, they appear to be significantly less useful when used to analyze gradual structural changes over a period of time. In this paper, we present an interactive visualization methodology for dynamic social networks. Our technique focuses on revealing the community structure implied by the evolving interaction patterns between individuals. We apply our visualization to analyze the community structure in the US House of Representatives. We also report on a user study conducted with the participation of behavioral ecologists working with social network datasets that depict interactions between wild animals. Findings from the user study confirm that the visualization was helpful in providing answers to sociological questions as well as eliciting new observations on the social organization of the population under study.
A visual analytics approach to dynamic social networks
- in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies (i-KNOW
, 2011
"... The visualization and analysis of dynamic networks have become increasingly important in several fields, for instance sociology or economics. The dynamic and multi-relational nature of this data poses the challenge of understanding both its topological structure and how it changes over time. In this ..."
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Cited by 14 (4 self)
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The visualization and analysis of dynamic networks have become increasingly important in several fields, for instance sociology or economics. The dynamic and multi-relational nature of this data poses the challenge of understanding both its topological structure and how it changes over time. In this paper we propose a visual analytics approach for analyzing dynamic networks that integrates: a dynamic layout with user-controlled trade-off between stability and consistency; three temporal views based on different combinations of node-link diagrams (layer superimposition, layer juxtaposition, and two-and-a-halfdimensional view); the visualization of social network analysis metrics; and specific interaction techniques for tracking node trajectories and node connectivity over time. This integration of visual, interactive, and automatic methods supports the multifaceted analysis of dynamically changing networks.
A.: Exploring temporal ego networks using small multiples and tree-ring layouts
- In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions (2011), ACHI
"... Abstract—Many of the current dynamic network visuali-sations methods or techniques rely on node-link force-based models that were originally developed for visualising static net-work snapshots. In this study, we diverge from this traditional layout approach and develop a layout for ego networks that ..."
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Cited by 10 (0 self)
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Abstract—Many of the current dynamic network visuali-sations methods or techniques rely on node-link force-based models that were originally developed for visualising static net-work snapshots. In this study, we diverge from this traditional layout approach and develop a layout for ego networks that places the time dimension in the foreground, by turning time into an element of shape. In addition to this we develop an interactive system that enables the visualisation of multiple networks simultaneously by employing small multiples. Using the proposed layout and analytical system as a grounding visual structure, we visually characterise dynamic network events in 3 different networks; the evolution of the biotechnology field, a phone call data set and a network of passenger connections of an airline. From this analysis we propose a range of ego network visual motifs that can be used as templates to
return The Delineation of an Interdisciplinary Specialty in terms of a Journal Set: The Case of Communication Studies Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (forthcoming)
"... A journal set in an interdisciplinary or newly developing area can be determined by including the journals classified under the most relevant ISI Subject Categories into a journal-journal citation matrix. Despite the fuzzy character of borders, factor analysis of the citation patterns enables us to ..."
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Cited by 10 (5 self)
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A journal set in an interdisciplinary or newly developing area can be determined by including the journals classified under the most relevant ISI Subject Categories into a journal-journal citation matrix. Despite the fuzzy character of borders, factor analysis of the citation patterns enables us to delineate the specific set by discarding the noise. This methodology is illustrated using communication studies as a hybrid development between political science and social psychology. The development can be visualized using animations which support the claim that a specific journal set in communication studies is increasingly developing, notably in the “being cited ” patterns. The resulting set of 28 journals in communication studies is smaller and more focused than the 45 journals classified by the ISI Subject Categories as “Communication. ” The proposed method is tested for its robustness by extending the relevant environments to sets including many more journals.
Animating the Development of Social Networks over Time using a Dynamic Extension of Multidimensional Scaling. El Profesional de la Información
, 2008
"... The animation of network visualizations poses technical and theoretical challenges. Rather stable patterns are required before the mental map enables a user to make inferences over time. In order to enhance stability, we developed an extension of stressminimization with developments over time. This ..."
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Cited by 9 (6 self)
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The animation of network visualizations poses technical and theoretical challenges. Rather stable patterns are required before the mental map enables a user to make inferences over time. In order to enhance stability, we developed an extension of stressminimization with developments over time. This dynamic layouter is no longer based on linear interpolation between independent static visualizations, but change over time is used as a parameter in the optimization. Because of our focus on structural change versus stability the attention is shifted from the relational graph to the latent eigenvectors of matrices. The approach is illustrated with animations for the journal citation environments of Social Networks, the (co-)author networks in the carrying community of this journal, and the topical development using relations among its title words. Our results are also compared with animations based on PajekToSVGAnim and SoNIA.
