TY - GEN
T1 - SocialMapExplorer
T2 - Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, XSEDE 2013
AU - Cai, Y. Dora
AU - Ahmed, Iftekhar
AU - Pilny, Andrew
AU - Brown, Channing
AU - Atouba, Yannick
AU - Poole, Marshall Scott
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2013 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) provide unique opportunities to investigate large social networks, such as player (working-group), trading, and communication (chat) networks. This paper presents a visualization tool - SocialMapExplorer - that allows users to explore these networks over temporal-geographic space. Implemented on the GoogleMap framework, this web-based interactive tool applies visual features, including color, size, shape, weight and font, to represent various network features. Unlike other similar tools, SocialMapExplorer visualizes data on a real map and couples time and spatial information with other attributes. To meet the challenge of intensive computation, this tool runs on high performance computers. Three modules have been implemented: (1) NetViewer that analyzes network dynamics by visualizing social networks in time series; (2) GroupDetector that investigates group assembly and evolution by tracing groups in visualized data flow; and (3) CorrelationFinder that studies the correlation between selected census variables (such as age, gender, race, population, income, education, occupation, and marital status) and game-play variables (such as play time, play frequency, achievement, and loss) by overlapping the measurements of census data and game log data. We performed this study on EverQuestII (EQII) game logs. This demonstration of the tool shows how it can help us discover events that trigger a group to emerge, shrink, and expand, and explore the relationship between census data and game data. This paper presents the design of this visualization tool, demonstrates its functions on real game data, and discusses its applications to virtual social network analysis associated with temporal-geographic space.
AB - Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) provide unique opportunities to investigate large social networks, such as player (working-group), trading, and communication (chat) networks. This paper presents a visualization tool - SocialMapExplorer - that allows users to explore these networks over temporal-geographic space. Implemented on the GoogleMap framework, this web-based interactive tool applies visual features, including color, size, shape, weight and font, to represent various network features. Unlike other similar tools, SocialMapExplorer visualizes data on a real map and couples time and spatial information with other attributes. To meet the challenge of intensive computation, this tool runs on high performance computers. Three modules have been implemented: (1) NetViewer that analyzes network dynamics by visualizing social networks in time series; (2) GroupDetector that investigates group assembly and evolution by tracing groups in visualized data flow; and (3) CorrelationFinder that studies the correlation between selected census variables (such as age, gender, race, population, income, education, occupation, and marital status) and game-play variables (such as play time, play frequency, achievement, and loss) by overlapping the measurements of census data and game log data. We performed this study on EverQuestII (EQII) game logs. This demonstration of the tool shows how it can help us discover events that trigger a group to emerge, shrink, and expand, and explore the relationship between census data and game data. This paper presents the design of this visualization tool, demonstrates its functions on real game data, and discusses its applications to virtual social network analysis associated with temporal-geographic space.
KW - Mmogs
KW - Network dynamics
KW - Social networks
KW - Temporal-geographic space
KW - Virtual networks
KW - Visualization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84882311158&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84882311158&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2484762.2484805
DO - 10.1145/2484762.2484805
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84882311158
SN - 9781450321709
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - Proceedings of the XSEDE 2013 Conference
Y2 - 22 July 2013 through 25 July 2013
ER -