A Multiple-Aspects Visualization Tool for Exploring Social Networks

Social network analysis (SNA) has been used to study the relationships between actors in social networks, revealing their features and patterns. In most cases, nodes and edges in graph theory are used to represent actors and relationships, and graph representations are used to visually analyze social networks. However, many visualization tools using network diagrams tend to depict most information about social networks by using the properties of nodes, which result in a visual burden when identifying actors or relationships according to certain properties. There is a lack of tools to support work by investigators to provide insights into multiple-aspect networks. We considered actors, relationships, and communities to be three important elements, and developed a tool called MixVis that integrates a tagcloud, network diagrams, and a list to show the elements. Our tool allows users to explore social networks from elements of interest, and acquire details through links with the three different viewpoints.