Or consider this image from NetMiner:
What is a social network analyst to make of this? The network structure is more obscured than enlightened by the 3D effect. And no amount of tweaking can make more than a quarter of the node labels intelligible at any one time.
I sat with my laptop in a cafe recently, pondering this seeming waste of technology. When suddenly the woman at the table behind me said, "Excuse me, but what are you working on?"
Yes. I had unwittingly stumbled into the SNA "Axe Effect."
I sat with my laptop in a cafe recently, pondering this seeming waste of technology. When suddenly the woman at the table behind me said, "Excuse me, but what are you working on?"
Yes. I had unwittingly stumbled into the SNA "Axe Effect."
2 comments:
LOL! You should post that[flirting via SNA visualization] on SOCNET. So, maybe the first date should be at a Mark Lombardi exhibit?
Yes, 3D often obscures structure rather than make it obvious. I think we need to go from 2D to Virtual Reality... 3D is just a large pothole along the way.
Has anyone use "4D" techniques for social network graphics? What I'm thinking of would be to have a series of repeating images of the social network, arranged over time - ala Tufte's "repeating images" - a key challenge likely being keeping the graphics at the same scale yet legible (might not fit on a screen, but might be doable in a large scale printout?
(I'm thinking probably of flat images so there isn't a perspective problem - but arranged as a series over time)
- online this might also though differently be achieved via stop motion animation effects - i.e. tracing the growth and change of a network over time
Shannon
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