Community Analysis and Visualization
Participants
- Ben Shneiderman, (Co-PI) - Professor, Computer Science, Researcher (and Founding Director) at HCIL
- Alan Neustadtl, (Co-PI) - Associate Professor at the Sociology Department, University of Maryland
- Catherine Plaisant, (Co-PI) - Research Scientist, UMIACS, Associate Director of Research at HCIL
- Art Hanson, Executive Director of Nation of Neighbors
- Jae-wook Ahn, NSF CRA Fellow, HCIL
- Jeehye (Jessie) Kang, Graduate Student at the Sociology Department, University of Maryland
- PJ Rey, Graduate Student at the Sociology Department, University of Maryland
- Awalin Sopan, Graduate Student at the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland
- Meirav Taieb-Maimon, Visiting Professor from the Department of Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
- Nick Violi, Graduate Student at the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland
Project Description
Nation of Neighbors is Neighborhood Watch for the 21st century. It facilitates real-time collaboration within communities and between community members and Law Enforcement. Their mission is to enable Citizens and Law Enforcement to work together to fight and deter crime and improve our communities.
This project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between Computer Science, HCIL, and Sociology at the University of Maryland. The goal is to design and develop visualization and analytic tools to facilitate the study of social networks. We also hope to increase Nation of Neighbors' effectiveness in facilitating community engagement and reducing crime.
Publications
- Sopan, A., Rey, P.J., and Shneiderman, B., The dynamics of web-based community safety groups: Lessons learned from the Nation of Neighbors, IEEE Signal Processing (to appear, 2012).
- Ahn, J., Taieb-Maimon, M., Sopan, A., Plaisant, C., Shneiderman, B. Temporal Visualization of Social Network Dynamics: Prototypes for Nation of Neighbors Proc. Of Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction conference, pp. 309-316, 2011.
- Rey, P. "Defining and Measuring Success for Online Crime Prevention Communities." AMCIS 2011 Proceedings.
- Violi, N., Shneiderman, B., Hansen, A., Rey, P. Motivation for Participation in Online Neighborhood Watch Communities: An Empirical Study Involving Invitation Letters. Proc. IEEE Conference on Social Computing 2011 (October 2011, Boston, MA), IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ�.
- Kang, J. and Neustadtl, A., Social Life in an Online Neighborhood: Conversational Network Analysis of Nation of Neighbors, Proc. of the Eastern Sociological Society,� 2012 Annual Meeting (see also the related masters thesis paper)
- Rey, P.J., The Influence of Leadership on Activity Levels in an Online Crime Watch Community. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. Denver, CO. 20 August 2012
- Sopan, A., Rey, P., Butler, B., Shneiderman, B. Monitoring Scientific Conference: Real-time Visualization and Retrospective Analysis of the Backchannel Conversation. to appear in Proc. Social Informatics 2012.�
Under Review as of Dec 2012
- Ahn, J., Plaisant, C., Shneiderman, B. "A Task Taxonomy of Network Evolution Analysis."; under review IEEE VGTC.
- P.J. Rey, Awalin Sopan, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman, Alan Neustadtl The Influence of Leadership on Activity Levels in an Online Crime Watch Community (Dec. 2012)
Honor
- Awalin Sopan's poster "The Dynamics of Web-Based
Community Safety Groups: Lessons Learned from the Nation of Neighbors"
WON THIRD PLACE in the �ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at the 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing .
Visualization tools
This project contributed to the development and/or evaluation of the following tools- ManyNets: Visualize Many Networks Simultaneously
- NodeXL: Network Overview for Discovery and Exploration in
Excel
- Tempovis
- Team members also worked with two class projects, leading to two new prototypes:
- NetEvViz:
Khurana, U., Nguyen, V., Cheng, H., Ahn, J., Chen, X., and Shneiderman, B., Visual analysis of temporal trends in social networks using edge color coding and metric timelines, Proc. IEEE Conference on Social Computing, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ (October 2011). - NetVisia:
Gove, R., Gramsky, N., Kirby, R., Sefer, E., Sopan, A., Dunne, C., Shneiderman, B., Taieb-Maimon, M., NetVisia: Heat Map and Matrix Visualization of Dynamic Social Network Statistics and Content, In SocialCom '11:Proc. IEEE 3rd International Conference on Social Computing (October 2011), 19-26.
Other Presentations
- "Nation of Neighbors: Design and Network Evolution for Internet Community Safety Systems," presented by Ben Shneiderman, PJ Rey, and Jae-wook Ahn. UMD Interdisciplinary Lecture Series on TMSP (Feb-March 2011).
- Lecture Slides
- “Motivation for Participation in Online Neighborhood Watch Communities,” presented by Nick Violi. Theorizing the Web 2011.
- Lecture Slides
- "Nation of Neighbors: Understanding Users and their Motivations," presented by PJ Rey. 28th Annual HCIL Symposium.
- Lecture Slides: Short Version | Long Versions
- "Visualizing the Temporal Evolution of Networks," presented by Awalin Sopan and Jae-wook Ahn. 28th Annual HCIL Symposium.
- "Design and Network Evolution for Internet Community Safety Systems," presented by Ben Shneiderman. NSF Principal Investigators: Social Computational Systems Workshop, Minneapolis, MN, June 9-11, 2011.
Sponsorship
This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation, grant # IIS - 0968521 "Supporting A Nation of Neighbors with Community Analysis Visualization Environment". Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
