Tag Archives: Social network data

Small Data to study the Web: The ANAMIA project

We have just published the results of our research project ANAMIA, studying the personal networks and online interactions of persons with eating disorders (“ana” and “mia” in web jargon). The report has just come out:

Documents

Report: Young internet users and eating disorder websites: beyond the notion of “pro-ana” (pdf, 92 pp, in French)

Infographic: results and recommendations of the ANAMIA project (pdf, in French)

Summary (in English!)

The ana-mia webosphere had remained opaque for long, with little data available for a science-based understanding of it. As a result, misconceptions proliferated and policy-makers hesitated — threatening censorship but without devising solutions to reach out and support a population in distress. Our study has been the first to overcome these limitations and reveal the social environment, actual eating practices and digital usages of persons with eating disorders in the English and French web.

Fig1

Visualization of the personal networks of four individuals with, respectively, EDNOS (Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified, top panel, left), anorexia nervosa (top, right), bulimia nervosa (bottom, left), binge eating (bottom right). Hollow circles represent their face-to-face acquaintances, filled circles their online ones. Colours indicate relational proximity to the subject (green: intimate, blue: very close, yellow: close, red: somewhat close). Source: ANAMIA project report.

Continue reading “Small Data to study the Web: The ANAMIA project”

Three tools to visualize personal network data – continued

Yesterday, Antonio Casilli and I gave our promised talk on network data visualization. It was an opportunity to discuss the extension of the tools we developed within a given research project to other network studies, and to reflect on the contribution as well as the limitations of data visualizations. Here are our slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/bodyspacesociety

Bodyspacesociety Blog | SlideShare via kwout

Three tools to visualize personal networks

Data visualization techniques are enjoying ever greater popularity, notably thank to the recent boom of Big Data and our increased capacity to handle large datasets. Network data visualization techniques are no exception. in fact, appealing diagrams of social connections (sociograms) have been at the heart of the field of social network analysis since the 1930s, and have contributed a lot to its success. Today, all this is evolving at unprecedented pace.

In line with these tendencies, the research team of the project ANAMIA (a study of the networks and online sociability of persons with eating disorders, funded by the French ANR) of which I was one of the investigators, have developed new software tools for the visualization of personal network data, with different solutions for the three stages of data collection, analysis, and dissemination of results.

Specifically:

– ANAMIA EGOCENTER is a graphical version of a name generator, to be embedded in a computer-based survey to collect personal network data. It has turned out to be a user-friendly, highly effective interface for interacting and engaging with survey respondents;

Continue reading “Three tools to visualize personal networks”