Mapping your connections(ITBA Lab session 9)

For this assignment, I have taken the help of facebook application Netvizz and have used an open source software Gephi.

Netvizz allows you to extract data from different sections of the Facebook platform for research purposes. It creates network files in the gdf format (a simple text format that specifies a graph) as well as statistical files using a tab separated format
These files can then be analyzed and visualized using graph visualization software such as the powerful and very easy to use gephi platform or statistical tools such the interactive visualization software Mondrian.
Big networks may take some time to process.
Gephi  is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

Gephi is a tool for people that have to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop but for data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden properties. The goal is to help data analysts to make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing. It is a complementary tool to traditional statistics, as visual thinking with interactive interfaces is now recognized to facilitate reasoning. This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis, a paradigm appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research.

1) I am a 2010 (Electrical engineering) pass out of NIT Durgapur. The date that I have extracted (Netvizz) and analyzed (using Gephi) is from a group called  "Tricalites 2006-2010 Batch (NIT DGP)".

Click here to see the group 

2) After extracting , I ran the data on Gephi.

The figure below tabulates the data according to Nodes, Sex, Id and Group Id.

3)The next figure shows the kind of connections that are there in between the members of the group. From the figure we can see that almost all of them are connected to each other i.e almost all happen to be mutual friends.

Number of nodes = 51

Number of edges = 995

4) The next figure shows the same connections in the form of a cloud.

5) The next figure shows the nodes after the "Fruchterman Reingold" layout was applied.

The figure below has been deliberately zoomed to bring out a better view of the nodes and the connections.

Features of Gephi :
1) Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.
 

2)Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
 

3)Gephi is open-source and free.
 

Applications :

Exploratory Data Analysis: intuition-oriented analysis by networks manipulations in real time.

Link Analysis: revealing the underlying structures of associations between objects, in particular in scale-free networks.

 Social Network Analysis: easy creation of social data connectors to map community organizations and small-world networks.

Biological Network analysis: representing patterns of biological data.

Poster creation: scientific work promotion with hi-quality printable maps.