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Visualization of Social Networks

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Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications
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Abstract

With the ubiquitous characteristic of the Internet, today many online social environments are provided to connect people. Various social relationships are thus created, connected, and migrated from our real lives to the Internet environment from different social groups. Many social communities and relationships are also quickly constructed and connected via instant personal messengers, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and a great variety of online social services. Since social network visualizations can structure the complex relationships between different groups of individuals or organizations, they are helpful to analyze the social activities and relationships of actors, particularly over a large number of nodes. Therefore, many studies and visualization tools have been investigated to present social networks with graph representations. In this chapter, we will first review the background of social network analysis and visualization methods, and then introduce various novel visualization applications for social networks. Finally, the challenges and the future development of visualizing online social networks are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation.

  2. 2.

    People EntityCube, http://entitycube.research.microsoft.com/

  3. 3.

    Twitter social network, http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/04/19/twitter-social-network-analysis/

  4. 4.

    Nexus, http://nexus.ludios.net/

  5. 5.

    Touchgraph, http://www.touchgraph.com

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Correspondence to Ing-Xiang Chen .

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Chen, IX., Yang, CZ. (2010). Visualization of Social Networks. In: Furht, B. (eds) Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_27

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