Lab 3 - Social Network data in Gephi

Social Network data of a Public Facebook group, being analysed in Gephi

Today we learnt how to use Gaffi to analyse Facebook data. Our tutor used data showing the influence of friends in her network, the rest of us used data downloaded from a Public Facebook group. To download the data, we used Netvizz.

Once the data was downloaded, we could open the graph file in Gaffi. First impression was a whole lot of dots and lines. It was as though someone had tried to do one of those connect-the-dots drawings. Then we were told that each dot actually represents a post. Oh!

Next we learnt that there's different ways to view the data. I explored some of the options besides the ones we were instructed to use (YifanHu and YifanHu's Multilevel) but at this elementary stage, I couldn't grasp the significance of the different data views. 

We also tried changing the colours. I also tried dragging the dots around, trying to "untangle" them. Pointless really, considering it's a connected up network!

There was also the option to change the size of the dots, so a bigger dot represented greater influence.

I can see this would be useful... perhaps there is a way to track back to that post (using the number provided) and see what it was about the content in that post that was so influential!

The picture at the very top of this post shows a view where the number assigned to each post shows instead of datapoints. This looked very cool. Messy, and dense, but exciting.