1. Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan and Nikolay Burlutskiy
University of Brighton, UK {M.Sathiyanarayanan,
N.Burlutskiy}@brighton.ac.uk VisionNet 2015, co-located with ICACCI
2015 Orissa, India Visualizing Social Networks using a Treemap
overlaid with a Graph
2. Motivation These days, people use social networks in their
communication every day. For example, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
and Instagram are widely used by people all around the world.
However, the complexity and scale of these networks motivates
people to design various visualizations for the exploration of
data
3. What is the challenge? Visualization of a social network
using an Euler diagram is challenged by a Treemap diagram. The main
motivation for this challenge is to evaluate the performance,
limitations and usefulness of the designed visualizations.
4. Addressing the Problem Euler diagram and treemap diagram
were designed to visualize a Twitter network. Nodes were added to
convey more information. Edges were added to the Nodes - Euler
diagram with graph and a treemap diagram with graph were designed.
We varied the number of Curves, Edges, and Nodes. These diagrams
were evaluated by the participants. Finally, the results for the
evaluation of a Twitter network visualization were demonstrated and
discussed.
5. Design of the Study Diagrams were drawn using the software
Inkscape. We considered three different sizes of curves/rectangles:
small, medium and large. 23 participants were randomly selected
from the University of Brighton for the study. Eighteen of the
participants were male, five female, and their age varied from 20
to 29 years with 24.3 years as the mean value for their age. We
used a software called as ``Research Vehicle, developed by Andrew
Blake of University of Brighton, for the participants to answer the
questions. This software recorded both the time taken and the
number of errors committed.
6. Diagrams Type 1 Euler Diagram Treemap Diagram
7. Diagrams Type 2 Euler Diagram with nodes Treemap Diagram
with nodes
8. Diagram Type 3 Euler Diagram overlaid by a graph
9. Diagram Type 3 Treemap Diagram overlaid by a graph
10. Results 23 participants using the 9 variations of treemaps
along with the 9 variations of Euler diagram visualizations are
shown in the Table. Note: M(T) is the mean value for the response
time and Sd(T) is a standard deviation. M(E) is the mean value for
the error rate and Sd(E) is a standard deviation.
11. Discussion Accuracy performance - t-test did not reveal any
significant difference between treemaps and Euler diagrams at any
of the three levels. Response time - analysis of variance (ANOVA)
did not reveal any significant difference between treemaps and
Euler diagrams at any of the three levels.
12. Future Works We will include interaction in the
visualization in order to popularize the visualization as a tool
for social network analysis. The main issue of fusing graphs with
treemaps and Euler diagrams is in scalability, thus, it is
necessary to address this issue in further research. This work can
be considered as a performance evaluation for the novel type of
social network visualization based on a combination of a treemap
and a graph. In the next study, it is planned to consider different
layouts, topological properties and aesthetic properties for
evaluating these visualizations.