Contribution by Trynke Keuning
Before doing complex analysis on the network data you collected it is often very useful to visualize your data. This can for example be done with the Netdraw function in UCINET, with the igraph package in R, or with NodeXL as Martin Rehm explained in an earlier post. Recently, I found another really nice way to visualise your network data. It is a (free!) software program called ‘Visone’ , which is Italian for ‘mink’ (this explains the funny animal in the Visone logo) but also stands for ‘visual social networks. The program has many nice features, I didn’t found out all the possibilities, but what I did found out was the really nice way to visualize change between two or more networks.
To give you an idea how Visone visualize change in networks, I made a small ‘demonstration-video’ with the networks of a school in the Focus-project I am currently working at. I asked team members of an elementary school: “With which colleagues do you discuss student achievement and progress at least once a month”. The team members answered this question twice: at the start of the Focus-intervention (an intervention about Data-Based Decision Making) and after having participated one year. I added both networks (in the form of n*n matrices) in Visone and coloured the nodes based on their function in the team: school leader, academic coach, teacher in the different grades, etc.. Subsequently, the size of the nodes was based on the number of incoming ties: few incoming ties, small node, many incoming ties, large node. Next, you can make a small movie in Visone, whereas: the red ties are the ties that disappear from T1 to T2 and the green ties are those which are created from T1 to T2. Additionally, you can see from the changing size of the nodes which persons in the network are becoming more central. Have a look at this video to watch the result:
You can download the software for free on the website: http://visone.info/. If you have questions about the program and the possibilities, check the manual or contact me (t.keuning[at]utwente.nl).
Network For Learning 