Social Mapping

Today we did social mapping, our team was slow XD But in the end we got it finished anyway. Yay V^^V

Then we had to put the data we got from that on to Gephi. At uni I didn't like any of the layouts I had in Gephi. Tried out a spiral layout but it looked like a terrible mess and didn't make sense at all. So when I got home I played around on it a bit to see if I can get a better layout.



On Gephi you can get layout set up on the side. This is the one called Fruchterman Reingold. It was my favourite one because I think circles are beautiful perfect shapes. But I don't think it made anything look organised so I didn't use this one either even though it looked great.



Later I tried different things on there. Like a semi-circle layout so that it looks like a basket. With this one it's a lot more organised and more aesthetic because it looks like a rainbow. However, I didn't like the overall shape enough and some of the edges were overlapping the labels too much.

Then I got the one above on the bottom. It turns out in preview you can make your edges curve and change the colour and size of your font properly. This one became my final because it's organised and is beautiful at the same time. The look for it came from corset laces while the hierarchy of the data was from things like food pyramids. So the people and objects with the least edges are at the top, while the ones with the most edges are at the bottom. This makes the edges criss-cross perfectly like on corsets. The colours of the objects along with the sizes of the nodes give the viewer an idea of how many people are linked to an object and how many links people have.

Hopefully it prints out all right on A3 >.>