Visual Encoding Approaches for Temporal Social Networks

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Copyright: Hoek, Peter
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Abstract
Visualisations have become an inseparable part of social network analysis methodologies. However, despite the large amount of work in the field of social network visualisation there are still a number of areas in which current visualisation methods can be improved. The current dynamic network visualisation approaches consisting of aggregation or animated movies suffer from various limitations, such as introducing artefacts that could obscure interesting micro-level patterns or disrupting the users’ internalised mental models. In addition, very few social network tools support the inclusion of semantic and contextual information or provide visual topological representations based on network node attributes. This thesis introduces novel approaches to the visualisation of social networks and assesses their effectiveness through the use of concept demonstrators and prototypes. These are the software artefacts of this thesis, which provide illustrations of complementary visualisation techniques that could be considered for inclusion into social network visualisation and analysis tools. The novel methods for visualising temporal networks introduced in this thesis consist of: • an Attribute-Based Graph Visualisation (ABGV) approach for introducing attributes as additional nodes of the sociogram, • a visual component for the Social Network Analysis for Command and Control (SNAC2) tool, useful for visualising the changing topology of the network at the same time with the contextual source of the links in the network, • a Parallel Arc Diagram Visualisation method and a software prototype the Temporal Interactive Parallel Arc Diagram (TIPAD) for discovering temporal patterns embedded in the network, and • a prototype for the Temporal Interactive Multi-slider Event and Relationship (TIMER) that combines node-link representations with representations of events in time without aggregation or animation, the main purpose of which is to preserve information faithfulness. In addition, this thesis extends the standard static taxonomic tasks with temporal tasks descriptions for the purpose of enhancing the evaluation of temporal visualisation techniques. The performance of the proposed methods was tested using a combination of case studies, publicly-available datasets and the features of the proposed methods compared with established tools. A taxonomic evaluation provides the basis for positioning the proposed methods within the social network visualisation domain.
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Author(s)
Hoek, Peter
Supervisor(s)
Abbas, Hussein
Frater, Michael
Sweeney, Michael
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Publication Year
2014
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
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