Day 49’s assignment was: “Quantity over quality. Work with a lot of something. It could be dried grains from the kitchen, a jar of buttons you have in your closet or all your t-shirts.”
I was both super behind on this assignment and yet also super ahead. Let me explain:
When I was on flickr about a month ago, I saw a photo someone had uploaded displaying their Facebook network connections. I thought it was a really interesting graph and that I would love to do one for my own network connections. I downloaded the program Gephi and using this fabulous tutorial, got to work.
About halfway through with messing with this, I got distracted by a side project and left the graph unfinished. Flashforward to Day 49’s project which I should have done 13 days ago (oops!). I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with this project, hence why I put it off for so long.
Then I remembered that I had my graph (filled with many, many connections!) half undone. I got back to work on it, using this other tutorial to help me color my different network sets.
The result:
Basically what I have here is 7 main groups in my network:
1. College Friends (Purple)
2. Family & their/our friends (Pink)
3. Friends from my American Contiki Tour (teal)
4. Friend from my NZ Contiki Tour (green)
5. Friends from my Australian Study Abroad Experience (Orange)
6. High School Friends (Light Blue)
7. Friends from the Camp in HS (dark blue)
plus a few randoms here and there whom do not have connections with any of my other friends.
I find it interesting to see a visual display of my friendships like this because the size of the node doesn’t always correspond to my real relationships with these people.
For example, two of my best friends from HS whom I talk on the phone with all the time and we hang out a lot, are just tiny specks on this graph. You can’t even see their names.
Also, a lot of the friends I made while doing those Contiki Tours have fairly large sized nodules. While I did make some pretty fabulous friends from these tours, I think the reason that they make such a big appearance on the graph is that I have a lot of pictures with/of them. So while some of these people I only hung out with them in person for 2-3 weeks, I might/do have more photos with them than I do with friends I have known for years.
However, the people with the largest nodes are definitely the people who I communicate the most with (or at least I do on facebook!)
Overall, I think it’s really cool what you can do in Gephi to chart your network connections. I’m curious to see how this all changes over time.
