For this activity, I created a visual map of my digital network to show the different communities, platforms, and spaces I interact with online. One thing that stood out while building it was how much overlap exists between different parts of my digital life.
A lot of the tools and platforms I originally thought of as academic or professional now cross into other areas as well. GitHub, LinkedIn, ChatGPT, and my WordPress blog all connect into teaching, technical development, academic learning, and professional identity at the same time.
I also noticed that some parts of my network feel much more interconnected than others. My Royal Roads learning network overlaps quite a bit with my teaching and technical communities, especially through online collaboration tools and shared digital spaces. At the same time, personal areas like family, soccer, travel, and friends remain somewhat more separate.
Rather than focusing only on people, I decided to create more of a socio-technical network map that included platforms, communities, tools, and institutions. I felt that represented my actual digital presence more accurately.
Oh, and a quick heads-up: the map above is completely interactive! You can grab any of the nodes and drag them around to your heart’s content. To be completely honest, there is no purpose to this feature at all. It won’t reveal any hidden secrets! It’s simply there because it was convenient for me to build it this way. It can be satisfying making a giant, tangled mess of my digital identity. Once you’re done wrecking the layout, just refresh the page to snap everything back to normal.
I built this visualization with help from ChatGPT to get me started. I used standard web languages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) along with a mapping library called vis-network. I hosted the file on GitHub Pages and used a WordPress iFrame plugin so it’s completely interactive. Piecing the data together code-line by code-line actually forced me to slow down and think more carefully about how interconnected the different parts of my digital identity really are.
28 May 2026 at 12:56 pm
Hi Craig,
I appreciate the approach you took to this activity. I focused on my LinkedIn connections, which allowed me to experiment with different ways of technically visualizing the dataset, but ultimately, I don’t feel the learning was all that relevant to evaluating my digital presence.
While more manual, the approach you took to synthesizing the digital networks you belong to is more pertinent to the reflection we need to engage with in this course. I may draw inspiration from your post to rethink the work that I completed in the context of my DIDP plan.
Thank you for the inspiration!
Claire
7 June 2026 at 10:49 pm
Thanks for stopping by Claire!
Thank you for the great feedback! I actually just popped over to your blog to look at your Visual Network Mapping, and it’s interesting to see how different our processes were.
I’m impressed with the dynamic interaction you managed on your map! There is definitely value in seeing the node-and-connection format of a specific network like LinkedIn. Your data export gave an accurate snapshot of that platform and highlighted those massive institutional clusters well.
I look forward to seeing how you evolve your network map for the DIDP reflection!