Social interactions make up a good portion of the mounds of of data that visualization tools can aesthetically portray, giving us a more holistic way to perceive them.  This week we tackle social interactions through data visualization, turning tweets, hashtags and Facebook updates into art.

Tweeting at the World Economic Forum

We first look at a slew of Twitter conversations during the World Economic Forum, looking at the hashtags #WEF and #Davos. There were only 2,500 participants at the event, but 36,000 Twitter accounts contributed to the global WEF conversation.

There are three key elements in understanding this particular visualization. The dots represent Twitter accounts, and the size of the nodes is proportional to their influence. The more nodes connect with others, the more influential they are and the larger they become. Second, the lines represent mentions or retweets between and among Twitter accounts.  And lastly, the colors are subnetworks or clusters representing replies and retweets.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.Websites are social too

Next, we have websites as graphs–here you can see their hierarchial arrangement and how they’re configured based on their content.  The artist looked at popular websites’ HTML code and created visualizations based on tags for images, tables, forms, etc.  The tags are represented in different colors, and as you can see they’re clustered like flowers. Websites visualized include cnn.com, apple.com, yahoo.com and boingboing.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Coming and going

Another beautiful visualization portrays the ebb and flow of people in Geneva. Swisscom subscribers in the city generate approximately 15 million connections from 2 million phone calls every day and this data is the digital record left as users are connected from cell tower to cell tower. It may be impossible to catch every detail, but the overall image is nonetheless spectacular.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Socially animated

Finally, we have an animation for a large social network. It is akin to a flower or a broccoli, whichever your imagination prefers. Apparently, it lacks certain details but data visualization isn’t all about the numbers. Aesthetics plays a major part too!