= Tool ======== Synopsis ======== Links =

>Tool

/etc/groups is a web application made with prefuse for the visualisation of big sets of data. It mainly looks forward visualising groups and organisations and the relations between them. It has been developed in the context of the common memory project which analyses how social movements have participated to social forums. It offers features of data filtering and a graphical search engine, that makes it useful for using it as a yellow page directory. This project comes in the form of a java applet that use graphML files or a JDBC/SQL connection for accessing the data and you need to install the java plugin for the full experience. You can download the aplication from sourceforge.


>Synopsis

>> Aims behind the development of this tool

This visualisation shows the links between groups and organisations that have realized activities and have participated to the past Social Forums (SF). This networked visualisation participates of the “memory rescue” dynamics that the common memory project has engaged since 2004. The etc/groups is connected to the directory of organizations that have inscribed themselves inside the past Social Forums, this database is developed and maintained by the euromovement's network. The etc/group is also connected to the “workspace” that consists on a tool that can be used as a platform to inscribe an organisation inside a social forum and, furthermore, organize its activities and actions through cooperation that are reflected inside the workspace. You can find a more detailed description of the workspace here.

You can have a look to the visualisations composed by the groups that did took part to a social forums and analyse their presence from several patterns as: fields of action, geographic provenance, past participation to social forums, forms of organisation, their mutual participation to a same network, or their affinities as groups exchanging and engaging towards each other.
In the visualization of the euromovement's directory of organizations that have participated inside an ESF, and in the visualisation of the workspace, there are two types of links : 'Is part of' when an organisation is part of a network and 'participated to' when two have participated in a same activity/seminaire.

The visualisation of the workspace shows more precisely the relations of cooperation and exchanges between the groups registered inside a SF. This visualisation is more related to showing ongoing, or possible, collaborations between groups in order to develop activities together meanwhile the Social Forum.
Etc/group is also an application that can be downloaded from sourceforge and be applied to other contexts, groups, actors and events. You can find some ideas about possibles applications that can be developed with etc/groups below.

>> Definitions and hypothesis

The social, political and informational networks can be understood and represented in multiple ways. About actual definitions and crosses representations of the networks you can find some documentation here. Related to a visualisation issue the networks analysis's must engage inside some common questions that must be taken in account during the first steps before making any technical development. This first step is related to the data collection's dimension and in which ways the construction of our aims and hypothesis will prefigure the technical features to be associated to the visualisation tool.

>> Which kinds of data can be visualized by etc/groups?

Hybrid data: data mining + relational data + living data.

>>> The live browsing of the European social forum database is based on data mining about the organisations that have registered inside one or several social forums. It can be useful to give each organisation visualized in the network its target contact information, as it is done on the right of the screen. Those contact data can provide an idea of the trajectory inside past esf of the organization.

>>> The workspace as it is visualised by etc/group shows the “social topography” underlying the construction of the program and furthermore the activities of the next esf: giving specific attention to the development of crossed actions/activities/proposals/groups of work. It could show, maybe also, the links and interactions between organizations in-between each social forum, but this is for now just a hypothesis to keep an eye on it.

>> How is orientated/applied the visualisation of the data?

To develop a visualisation tool means to develop a technical process (by the creation, completion of some code) that transcripts a specific architecture of information that aims to help in the creation of information and knowledge about a some thematic.
As we can see the dimension of the data is one of the first to be considered, related to the development of general and specific questions and degrees of curiosities that are embedded inside particulars dynamics of research, cooperation and exchange varying form very open dynamics to enclosed and militaristic secrets. Those dynamics of research develop hypothesis and build problematics that orientates the collection, organisation of data and so on the technical developments.
Added to the code's redaction is the choice of the “superstructure”, the commands/algorithms that will make possible some specifics data tracking and outputs on the screen. The visualisation is a result of all those steps and dimensions, it allows in our case to see and to complement ours analysis. Even if a derive approach can be realized with etc/group, making possible several promenades through the pool of data, an analytical posture may be desired to achieve some research based on a tool that visualises networks of data and organisations. This analytical posture will help us to test, compare, complete and reorient our knowledge paradigms. That brings us to the nature of the social networks we intend to visualize and analyse. This is about making clear that the development of tools to visualize social networks do themselves create social networks of ideas, conversations and exchanges that do effectively contribute to the creation of micropoliticals situations.

>> What do we understand by networks and social networks?.

We are talking either about “formal” ones, registered as networks in their legal status, and also “informal” ones. Those last ones have to be understood as ephemera’s, meaning more and less temporal connections betweens actors and groups that are manifesting the need/desire to spend some time together during an ESF in order to organize a debate, a workshop, a plenary, an activity, etc. In that sense those visualisations tries to show the networking temperature/ratio of the groups participating to the ESF, their capacity to swarm among them. It is also a visualisation to get an idea of the other groups that are working on near thematics/subjects/publics than your own organisation, showing you their location in relation with you or with your subject of interest. It makes possible to avoid the (obvious/known) connections with groups that you already know, and to discover groups and actions that could be useful and that you couldn't locate or map because of their geographical location, the fact that they are recent or because they are using methodologies of action and contribute to political practices you are not used to or that you may be not keen on per ej. In that sense, we are referring to implicit networks of action underlying common areas of action, publics or political practices.

One hypothesis underlying this visualisation tool is based on the idea that the “rhythms” of the organisations and activities formally planned and inscribed inside the social forums may reflect until some point the dynamics of alliances (and of divisions and gaps) existing actually between groups and actors composing the so called contemporaneous social movements. Of course this hypothesis is in some way related to the future of the social forums (to be checked in future sessions, will it keep going on, will it mute, will it disappear?) and in the use of its management logistical tool, the workspace, that has been developed by the webproject group (part of the Common memory Project) and sopinspace, in order to give to the ESF (and maybe the WSF) a possibility to produce memories about them through the design and proposal of communicational and informational fluxus in-between each SF.

There are two ways to navigate inside the dataspace of /etc/groups :
Browsing by using filters ( on the right side ), for example see all trade unions from africa.
Search a specific group with search engine, and extends its connections by clicking recursively on nodes. >> Other elements of comprehension:

>>Centrality,closeness, weight of each node of data

The distance between the nodes doesn't have too much signification, it is just calculated to optimize the display space. If there are one or less items displayed, the distance will be different. Furthermore, there no such information as strength of links in the database to make distances coherent with the closeness of two organisations. The organisations are grouped by clouds of activity (layers of colour), each cloud corresponds to their main field of activity.

>> How can those visualisations help users to track the objects that are interesting for them?

Based on the analitical guideline developed by Cristofoli, the user can achieve an analytical practice of the data visualised by the tool taking in account: «  a general description of the graph based on an analysis of its density + a general structure of the relations based upon the connectivity between the nodes + study the importance/weight of the summits that compose the visualisations based among the idea of centrality and peripherics + look for possible sub-groups (cohesion, similarities) ... ». It should be added to this analitical guideline some informations about the « metadata » meaning the sum of all the dimensions related to the collection and organisation of the data : « data cleansing, data tagging» [source: Pascal Cristofoli, « La construction de réseaux sociaux à partir de sources documentaires », Ecole d’été 2006 EHESS-INT, TIC et SHS - Des interactions multiples, entre outils et objets d’études , Porquerolles, 10-14 septembre 2006, Journée Les réseaux sociaux »]

>> How it has been developed

There has been several steps of tests, feed backs around the aims and possibilities of the tool, helping to define its technical characteristics... open process engage mostly by participants to the common memory project that come from various professional and activists backgrounds.
It has been developped with free software, open source through the reuse of the prefuse visualization toolkit: « A Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications. Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Licence: Prefuse is released under the terms of a BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) license, making it free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The exact license terms are spelled out in the prefuse license". [Source]

The algorithm is a radial graph layout: « Nodes are arranged on concentric rings around the focus node. Each node lies on the ring corresponding to its shortest network distance from the focus. Immediate neighbors of the focus lie on the smallest inner ring, their neighbors lie on the second smallest ring, and so on. Our implementation draws these rings explicitly to make the network distance apparent. The angular position of a node on its ring is determined by the sector of the ring allocated to it. Each node is allocated a sector within the sector assigned to its parent, with size proportional to the angular width of that node’s subtree. A method similar to this is described in some detail as “radial placement” in, where all the nodes are the same size, and so the angular width of a node’s subtree is simply the number of leaf nodes among its descendants.“ + radial trees are known as “target sociograms” and are used for examining social networks from a single actor's perspective. » [Source: "Animated Exploration of Dynamic Graphs with Radial Layout", Ka-Ping Yee, Danyel Fisher, Rachna Dhamija, Marti Hearst, University of California, Berkeley, 2001].The use of radial view proved itself useless in this context, because the structure of the data is not centered on one group as the center of everything, it is not hierarchical enough to produce a good radial tree. The layout is more of a 'cloud layout' where organisations behaving in the same domain are linked in layers of colour.

>Links

"The Graph Visualization System (GVS), A Flexible Java Framework for Graph Drawing", Wolfgang Prinzç
"Networks graduate course", A. Boudourides