Context-Driven Social Network Visualisation: Case Wiki Co-Creation

Abstract

Along social media and Web 2.0, the amount of data sources potentially available for social network visualisation has snowballed. Recent development on information visualisation technologies contribute to the availability of tools enabling visualisation of social media data. Yet, applying the tools in diff erent usage contexts is often diffcult. The data formats vary and many of the tools are platform-specific. Potential tools each have their strengths but often a single tool is not suffcient for covering all the aspects of analysis. In this paper, we describe the means of applying component-based information visualisation to streamline social network visualisation. Further, through our approach, we seek to narrow the gap between everyday knowledge work and visual social network analysis of the data that knowledge workers process. We acknowledge the need of programming skills in introducing the visualisations to different usage contexts but yet we see that teams of analysts can apply the approach when conducting network analysis in varying contexts. The main contributions of this article are the following: a description and an analysis of a streamlined social network visual analysis process and a brief review of the related applications and tools, based on the idea of conceptual integration of visual social network analysis and augmented browsing.