Understanding social relationships from photo collection tags

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much are twenty seven thousand photos worth? We believe that they can help tell the life history of a person. In this paper we present a depiction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman’s life based on a Network Analysis of MyLifePix, a highly curated collection of more than twenty seven thousand of his pictures that show the world from his camera lens. In this analysis we accessed the photos stored on Flickr and using information about the people in the pictures which is stored as tags on the system we created a network of personal appearances on the photos. Then we analyze the resulting network using NodeXL an open source Network Analysis and Visualization tool built on top of Microsoft Excel 2007. We found interesting results that show not only the two dimensions of Dr. Shneiderman’s life, the professional one and the personal one, but also details of both worlds that aren’t clear at first sight or easy to infer without prior knowledge of Dr. Shneiderman’s life.