Human Atlas: A Tool for Mapping Social Networks
Abstract
Most social network analyses focus on online social networks. While these networks encode important aspects of our lives they fail to capture many real-world connections. Most of these connections are, in fact, public and known to the members of the community. Mapping them is a task very suitable for crowdsourcing: it is easily broken down in many simple and independent subtasks. Due to the nature of social networks -- presence of highly connected nodes and tightly knit groups -- if we allow users to map their immediate connections and the connections between them, we will need few participants to map most connections within a community. To this end, we built the Human Atlas, a web-based tool for mapping social networks. To test it, we partially mapped the social network of the MIT Media Lab. We ran a user study and invited members of the community to use the tool. In 4.6 man-hours, 22 participants mapped 984 connections within the lab, demonstrating the potential of the tool.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1602.02426,
title = {Human Atlas: A Tool for Mapping Social Networks},
author = {Martin Saveski and Eric Chu and Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.02426},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
WWW'16 Demonstration, WWW'16 Companion, April 11-15, 2016, Montreal, Quebec, Canada