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Eighth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'04)
Inferring and Visualizing Social Networks on Internet Relay Chat
London, England
July 14-July 16
ISBN: 0-7695-2177-0
Paul Mutton, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Internet Relay Chat is a system that allows groups of people to collaborate and chat from anywhere in the world. Clearly defined by several RFC documents, it is arguably the most standard real-time chat system currently in use. This paper describes a method of inferring the social network of a group of IRC users in a channel. An IRC bot is used to monitor a channel and perform a heuristic analysis of events to create a mathematical approximation of the social network. From this, the bot can produce a visualization of the inferred social network on demand. These visualizations reveal the structure of the social network, highlighting connectivity, clustering and strengths of relationships between users. Animated output allows viewers to see the evolution of the social network over time. Some novel ideas for future work are discussed, showing other useful applications of this system.
Index Terms:
inferring social networks, visualization, animation, irc bot, heuristics, internet relay chat, spring embedder, shakespeare
Citation:
Paul Mutton, "Inferring and Visualizing Social Networks on Internet Relay Chat," iv, pp.35-43, Eighth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'04), 2004
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