In our Digital Learning Environments, Networks & Communities course we were to create a visualization of our current network. A tool from Socilab draws data from your LinkedIn profile and creates a visual graph of how that network is setup. Here is what mine looks like:
To give this some perspective, that blue dot in the centre is little ol’ me. From there each dot represents a contact I have via LinkedIn and each of those dots are interconnected to show the relationships that are shared and also how each relationship may have been created or connected.
As you can see, I have a few clusters of connections as this graph was sorted by industry but what was interesting is that there are a few dots that actually bridge those industries which shows the impact of how one person can be a conduit to a cluster of relationships. They are almost an “influencer” and I’d be curious to know if I fall into that category within any of my connections visual network.
While the concept for this process is intriguing, I do wish that the data wasn’t solely derived from LinkedIn and that perhaps future versions could integrate data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or other social media sites to help paint a more complete, and I’m sure more complex, portrait of how my digital network spans across the internet cosmos.
August 10, 2017 at 7:54 pm
Hello Gavin! Did you use some hidden functionality to acommodate the nodes so nicely around the center of your universe? I have generated my map several times using different criteria (location, industry, etc.), and what changes is the colour of the dots but their arrangement seems to remain pretty much the same… In any case, that’s a good question you post there about being an “influencer”. We’ll see.
Cheers!
Alfonso
August 17, 2017 at 8:41 pm
Hi Alfonso. After creating my network map via Socilab, there are a few options underneath the map such as “Coloring”, “Connections to Self” and “Names”. If you select the Connections to Self and hit “Enable”, the map will centre itself around you. You can then show or hide names for privacy and then also sort via industry/name/country/location with “Coloring”. Hope this helps! Cheers man.
Gavin.