Visualizing personal network dataExamples from a study on EDs websites

Antonio Casilli

Telecom ParisTech, Paris

Paola Tubaro

University of Greenwich, London

• Recurrent moral panic around websites on eating disorders, but effects on socialisation and health unclear

• The ANAMIA project: http://www.anamia.fr/en/

• Our approach: a personal networks perspective

• Map structure of relationships, investigate linkages with behaviours

• Reaching out to this population and comparing their online and offline networks

Pro-ana?

• Web data, quantitative survey, qualitative interviews

• 3 personal network datasets per respondent (face-to-face, online, support)

• Multiple methods employed in the analysis – SNA, regression, agent-based computer simulation, textual analysis

• Dataviz as more general support

Mixed methods, mixed data…

• “The desire to take what normally falls outside of the scale of human senses and to make visible and manageable” [Manovich 2002]

• Common tropes emerge: maps, natural metaphors (trees…), timelines, graphs…

• “Sensory expression -- most often visual, sometimes sonic or tactile -- is the only means to perceive many contemporary data sets” [Diamond 2010]

Grant access to information in an aesthetically informed, sensorly appealing manner

Defining datavisualization

Simple vulgarization tool?

«Pourquoi la censure et le filtrage ne marchent pas?», Le Monde, 16 Nov. 2012http://internetactu.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/11/16/pourquoi-la-censure-et-le-filtrage-ne-marchent-pas-lexemple-des-reseaux-lies-aux-troubles-de-lalimentation/

• Scientific accuracy

• Aesthetics

• Accessibility

• Cognitive effectiveness

Engage with social contexts of consumption of these images

Balance diverging exigencies

• The page-based paradigm of the web has been interrupted by database incursions[Liu, 2004].

• Personal, everyday experience of data immersion and navigation shape individual “data-subjectivity” [Manovich 2002]

The role of end-users

1st tool: Visualization for data collection

ANAMIA EGOCENTER (2010-11) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAlSaDdAaC0

Face-to-face egocentered networks

1st tool: Visualization for data collection

Online egocentered networks

1st tool: Visualization for data collection

• Situate data in an interpretative setting

• This requires building tools allowing to sort, order, analyze and present what we agree on calling source or “raw” data

• The issue of transdisciplinarity…

The role of researchers

2nd tool: Visualization for data analysis

ANAMIA CORPUS (2012-13) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIxqG6j0Izs

• Take into account the politics of quantified data representation (reminiscent of the debates about “who controls what’s on traditional media”)

• Establishing priorities, selecting methods and procedures

• Not sticking to tight scientific “realism”, but making sense of the data by building “heuristic narratives” which resound with (but are not limited to) empirical data.

• “Telling stories with data”

The politics of data visualization

3nd tool: Datavisualization for “heuristic narrative”

ANAMIA PERSONAL (2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-eR0SnFI2M

Thank you!

E-mail:coordination@anamia.frWeb:http://www.anamia.frTwitter:@anamia