randomosity

What a treat! I had had the honour of meeting and spending the last two days chatting with Fernanda Viégas from the Visual Communications Lab. Her work has been and continues to be inspirational for me personally and to the information visualisation community more substantially. She presented a tantalizing talk at the Social Network/ing conference at OISE/UofT. ‘Visualizing and Analyzing Social Networks’ quickly demonstrated a small facet of Many Eyes to a new audience and gave us a sneak preview of a new tool soon to be available through ManyEyes called PivotGraph. The logic of the PivotGraph is one of those ah-ha moments - it makes all the sense in the world, but leave it to Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg to visualize the problem, and come up with a brilliant way to solve it. Consider that social networks have traditionally been visualized in two ways: the node-link map and the matrix. The common to node-link method is very intuitive, but also becomes quickly cluttered and loses visualization value as the scale of the network being mapped grows. The second is the representative matrix, which scales very well, but sacrifices intuition for clarity. Realizing that there had to be a way of combining the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses, the PivotGraph hybridize these two forms using a collapsible node-link metaphor that, interactively aggregates like nodes and allows for focus on individual vectors. It’s nothing short of amazing to see in action!
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Avi Goldfarb presented a fast, concise and effective discussion of what conclusions could be drawn about multi-institutional collaboration between US universities during the era of BitNET adoption, 1981 - 1990. A bit of internet history, my ears perked up immediately. His more general framing question: How do changes in collabouration cost change how we produce knowledge.
His study examined 270 institutions as they connected to the BiTNET during this period and cross-indexed this with the number of coauthored journal articles subsequently produced. Goldfarb’s paper ‘Restructuring Research: Communication Costs and the Democratization of University Innovation’ concludes that collaboration was enhanced, but that the gain to institutions was not uniformly realized and physical distance between collabourators remained a factor.
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Despite technical difficulties (presenter’s worst nightmare - LCD projector bulb burnout), Steve Easterbrook demonstrated the usefulness of comparing software structures to social networks of developers to measure operational effectiveness. His well argued and logical presentation ‘Increasing Shared Understanding in Software Teams through Informal Knowledge Transfer Networks’ extended Conway’s Law to social network analysis. This technique of measuring socio-technical congruence is especially valuable in larger scale development projects, where it is probably less obvious about whether a development process is functioning effectivelly. By mining the data rich environment of communication and revision logs, it is possible to generate a social network map of developer interaction that can be connected to a software development schematic to determine Socio-Technical congruence.
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