Spherule Diagrams with Graph for Social Network Visualization

As social network information keeps growing, there is always a need for better information visualization techniques for carrying out multifarious analysis, which is commonly called as social network analysis. Social networks have become a big platform for advertisements, where a company targets highly connected than to more isolated users. To target highly connected users and their activities, visualizations such as Euler diagrams, Treemap diagrams, graphs and their combinations were tested by various researchers. Though Euler diagrams combined with graph and Treemap diagrams with graph have provided some interesting results, the one question yet to be answered is the scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel visual technique, "Spherule diagrams with graph", which addresses the scalability issue. The novel technique is then compared with the traditional Euler diagrams with graph using a twitter case study in an empirical form. Twenty-eight participants were exposed to eighteen diagrams (nine diagrams of each type of visualization) in a software which recorded accuracy and response time (i.e., performance measure). The results of 504 observations indicate that (a) there is no significant difference between the visualizations in terms of accuracy and (b) there is a significant difference between the visualizations in terms of response time. Also, users were asked to aggrandize between the two visualizations (i.e., preference measure), where 75% preferred Spherule diagrams with graph for its simplicity, comprehensiveness, navigation, alignment (layout), set ordering and data items ordering characteristics. We conclude that, Spherule diagrams with graph will be beneficial for researchers and practitioners in the information visualization community who are exploring social networks for business.