Contact Trees: Ego-Centered Visualization of Social Relations

Abstract

A topic of interest in social science research is the study of people’s social contacts and activities, where network visualization is often used to show relations among people and activities. However, network visualization is not ideal for studying individuals and comparing their social behavior and relationships with others based on data with rich attributes. In this talk, I will present ContactTree, a new ego-centered visualization design for highlighting patterns and trends in data, and for facilitating reasoning and comparison of interpersonal ties and contacts. The design is based on a botanical tree metaphor. The tree is easy to construct and the resulting tree-like visualization can display many properties of the data. I will show two case studies which were used to validate our method. The first study is based on a dataset consisting of two waves of 3-month contact diaries over 2004-2008. The second study uses a co-author network consisting of mainly information visualization researchers. This work is an ongoing collaboration with researchers at Academia Sinica.