Network science can provide a perspective to explore emerging patterns on friendships and communities among our Facebook connections.
As an experiment, each node on the graph in this visualization represents one friend on my personal Facebook. Edges are mutual friendships among them. The clusters are classified by a modularity analysis. This algorithm uses common connections to determine “communities”.
Surprisingly, we can see a strong correspondence among the communities classified by network science and those existing in real life.
This work was part of a data visualization competition at NetSci2019.
Methods: Facebook data from LostCircles, data exploration with Gephi, and Adobe Fireworks for final touches.
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