Networks and Nodes - Investigating Personal Network Connections

Personal Network Visualization

For class we were asked to record information on the different people that we spoke to only one day last week and create a visualization based off of this information (I used NodeXL for this). My chart analyzing this information can be seen above. The node shapes were chosen to group individuals by both geographical proximity and social ties - circles are family members that live in the same house as I do; diamonds are family members that live >100 miles away; the square is a friend who lives locally; solid triangle is a friend located >500 miles away; and the open triangle (which is unfortunately covered in the graph by the label) is a professor who lives locally. Node size is representative of how often or how long I spent communicating with that individual on the sample day.

With 5 of the 8 connections I made that day being members of my family, it's not surprising that the majority of my daily personal connections know each other. That said, we often still utilize each other to pass on information to the others because it's easier than texting or calling everyone we want to keep in the loop. The other individuals that I spoke to do not know each other and while information might flow from them to other members of my network, there is no way for them to convey that information without going through me.

tl;dr : Even with the widespread use of advanced technology it all still boils down to interpersonal connections and relationships.