Social Network Visualization

Authors:

  • Magnus Sköld

Publish date: 2008-06-10

Report number: FOI-R--2477--SE

Pages: 52

Written in: English

Abstract

This thesis describes a tool for visualizing and analysing social networks. Social networks structures relations between individuals or organizations and are visualized as graphs. Individuals and organizations are represented as nodes and relations are represented by edges. It is also possible to visualize individuals, organizations and relations as nodes and use edges to associate individuals and organizations with a relation. In this project, we create an extra node for relations when visualizing social networks. Using network measures, we can analyse a social network to rank the nodes in the network. The network metrics are based on graph theory and we describe the part of graph theory, that is relevant to social network analysis in this thesis. We also describe some of the network metrics. Another use for social network analysis is finding communities within a social network, some of the community detection algorithms are described in this thesis.