So, I’ve been playing around with Gephi for a few weeks, following several examples from OUseful.Info, the blog and the Gephi tutorials page. I’ve been wanting to create visualizations of my social networks and until now I haven’t had much time.
Initially my wheels were spinning in place because I couldn’t grab my Facebook data in a format suitable for Gephi. The recommended application Netvizz for Facebook data wasn’t working. It took me some time to find an alternative But I did. I found an alternative called NameGenWeb. This app will let you download your Facebook connections data in Guess, UCINet, or GraphML for use in Gephi. It also gives you an option to delete the data. Though, if in fact the data is actually deleted we can’t know for sure.
From there I basically followed this tutorial. I played around with various Gephi layouts until I settled on one that was visually appealing AND representative of my data. This is a balancing act that needs further reflection. Still, what I realized during this process is that those on my network who are heavily connected are those that I interact with the least in person or on Facebook.
The dark blue clusters are essentially high school “friends.” They are the connections that I typically hide in my feed window because I don’t want to see their gaming scores, to-do lists, or what not. Though Facebook is essentially a lot of what not, isn’t it? Why don’t I delete? I don’t delete because it is too much trouble. Besides, deleting “friends,” even the artificial kind, can potentially lead to awkward social encounters. (yes, this happened to me).
In this visualization I also have outlier clusters. These clusters represent recent friends, students, or colleagues from various locations. Surprisingly, those outlier clusters are friends I tend to interact with on a regular basis.
What I like most about the exercise of visualizing my social network is that it creates a narrative of the relationships I have with “friends.” Relationships that I didn’t really think much of before capturing it within my visual field.
