VisualizationsByJosefina

What are networks?

TLDR: a network displays how things are connected. Many of my friends do not fully understand what I do, sometimes they are super focused on the graphs or networks I make. Which, honestly, I don’t blame them, as one friend said they look like constellations. They are cute to look at and have a lot of information

Without having to do a whole course, lets talk about networks and how they can be read! Networks can show the relationships between people, ideas, or places. Since my ‘specialty’ is in social networks–networks that show the relationships between people–we will focus on those!

Before I get to some small definitions, there are two types of networks! Undirected and Directed. Undirected, in terms of people, that both people know each other. For instance, I know my mom, and obviously my mom knows me. For directed, its that you know a person but they don’t know you. For instance, I follow Jackson Wang on instagram, but Jackson? he doesn’t follow me (honestly, pretty fake if you ask me lol). For my mini project, it is focusing on a directed network.

Definitions

• Network
  • A collection of nodes connected by edges
  • sometimes I will refer to a network as a graph, but I am going to try to stick with the word network
• Node
  • A person, object, idea
• Edge
  • Line connecting nodes together

Let’s visualize an undirected network! They are much simpler to create and look at, plus it’s ✨intuitive✨ to understand.

First off, Princess and the Frog? Probably one of my favorite Disney princess movies, the soundtrack is SO GOOD, and the movie in Spanish?! even better!! love! Anyways, the network has each character categorized as type: animal, both, or human. Tiana and Naveen, since they become frogs in the movie, are classified as both. The nodes are the colored circles representing each character–Tiana, Louis, Ray, and Naveen (just to name a few) are considered nodes. Where the lines that are connecting them to each other is an edge–notice there is one edge or one line between Tiana and Fenners. Usually we go into detailing that the thicker the line, edge, is the stronger the connection. In this case, each edge represents the number of scenes that they talk to each other. I could have looked at the number of lines that each character says to one another, but I focused on counting the first instance in a scene where the characters actually spoke. Let’s assume, we have NEVER seen Princess and the Frog (if you haven’t you need to) looking at the network, it would be easy to tell that the main characters are Tiana and Naveen. This can be determined based on the edge count, in graph theory, this is referred to as the degree of a node. For now, that is where I am going to leave that. Maybe I will make a crash course on networks and graph theory, but let’s hold off on that for today!

There is so much that can be done with networks! We can analyze how they change over time, who is the most connected person, or the most influential person. It can go outside the realm of people as well! Did you know the food chain can be considered a network as well?! Even the world wide web is a network, and transportation of goods or flights can be considered networks. Ahhh, tbh I love networks, maybe I will share some of my old networks I created (they do not look nice at all though LOL).

Anyways, that is all for now! Hopefully this helps you get a better understanding of what a network is, even if that means you think it’s a constellation. If you keep up with my AOMG_Mini_Project, you will also get a better understanding of how to analyze and look at networks as well 💃🏻

Until next time 💕

Josefina