ViralViz: Visualizing Temporal Content Flow in Social Networks

With the expansion of data sharing and always-online devices, social networks have become an increasingly important aspect of society. Groups such as the SMR Foundation are constantly on the lookout for new tools to analyze these networks, particularly their behaviors over time. ViralViz is a visualization tool meant to aid in the study of the diffusion of content through social networks. It operates on GraphML formatted data, which can be gathered from Twitter through NodeXL. ViralViz uses topic-modeling tool MALLET to create topics from the data and display them as layers in a Streamgraph. ViralViz also provides tools to the user to allow for manipulation of the display and filtering of the data to aid in analyzing the social network. We chronicle the iterative development of the project including usability studies and refinements. Although receiving positive remarks for vision and functionality, a number of improvements are recorded here for future work.