Amongst my weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, and social network analysis. Applied properly, SNA is a great technique for gathering user data for later use in user-centered design. It can allow you to understand what your user segments are, how they’re connected, and, if you make some unfounded-but-logical assumptions, what their goals might be.

When I was learning various techniques for building a complete picture of a network, I realized I already knew most of the standard ones (surveys, journaling, content analysis of emails, etc).  So rather than rehashing all that for my final project, I decided to experiment with a more automated method of data collection so I could focus on the graph metrics.  I used a pre-existing corpus to which I’d already had substantial exposure: J.R.R.  Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Using a pre-defined list of characters great and small, plus any aliases they used in the books, I searched the text for the phrase “name1 and name2,” hypothesizing that characters with connections would appear in that phrase at least somewhere in the trilogy.  The number of hits on each phrase provided the edge width.  It was, if I do say so, surprisingly accurate.

Once I had the list of connections, I imported them into NodeXL to calculate metrics and generate a visualization.  The final graph yielded results both expected and surprising, which are detailed in this presentation I gave on it:

Middle Earth Social Network Analysis on Prezi

If you’d like to experiment with this stuff yourself, everything I used (well, except for the LOTR text) is free:

  • Download my bash script for finding pairs of characters here.
    • To use the script, simply open the file in a text editor and replace the character list therein with your own. Character names should be separated by spaces. Then run the script (make sure you’ve set your executable permissions — chmod 755 findpairs.sh should do the trick) and in a short while you’ll have a huge list of connections. Special thanks to Pam for her guidance on *nix scripting.
  • Download the resulting output for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings here.
  • Download a prettier, MS Excel version of the above output here.
    • Note: the format is MS Office 2007/2010 (xlsx). There are three sheets in the file: a list of all possible edges, actual existing connections, and the complete character list I used (including aliases).
  • Download my NodeXL file here.