At the most recent Creative Providence community forum, I was lucky enough to get a couple of minutes at the end to gather data for an experiment with some free, online visualization software from IBM called Many Eyes. Many Eyes includes several different visualization methods like word clouds and all kind of charts. But I was looking to use the network mapping tool.

Luckily, all you need to make a network map is a two-column spreadsheet that associates A with B. As long as you enter the same entity with the same spelling, the network mapping tool combines all the references to that entity into a single point whose size is determined by the number references. Entities with lots of connections are big dots connected to smaller dots.

In my two minutes at Creative Providence, I asked people to list:

• - themselves
• - their organization (if any)
• - their 3 - 5 strongest connections 

I got about 30 cards, and the spreadsheet has about 160 lines. Do you have connections to include? Leave a comment and I'll add them to the dataset.

If the embed is working properly, you can click on the elements in the network to see what they are connected to. If the embed below doesn't work, try it on the Many Eyes website. You may need to refresh your browser a couple of times.

After Rosemary had transcribed the "tablecloth" notes and the "pin board" results, I poured all that text into Many Eyes and created this tag cloud.

Email (will not be published)

Name

Title

Comment
 remaining characters

Post