Visualizing Facebook Data
This section lays down some templates and introduces some good starting points for analyzing and visualizing Facebook data. If youâve been following along, you now have the basic tools you need to get at anything the platform can provide. The types of exercises weâll explore in this section include:
Visualizing all the mutual friendships in your social network
Visualizing the mutual friendships within specific groups and for arbitrary criteria, such as gender
Building a simple data-driven game that challenges you to identify friends based on where they live now and their hometowns
The list of possibilities goes on and on, and with the necessary boilerplate intact, youâll have no trouble customizing the scripts weâll write to solve a variety of other problems.
Visualizing Your Entire Social Network
This section works through the process of fetching friendship information from your Facebook account and visualizing it in interesting and useful ways, with an angle toward using the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit (JIT). The JIT offers some great example templates that can easily be customized to whip up an interactive visualization.
Visualizing with RGraphs
An RGraph[58] is a network visualization that organizes the display by laying out nodes in concentric circles, starting from the center. RGraphs are available in many visualization toolkits, including the JIT. Itâs worth taking a moment to explore the JITâs RGraph examples to familiarize yourself with the ...
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