An Interactive Visual Representation to Explore Association with Hierarchical Social Circles

Abstract

Showing the relations between the contacts of an ego network, a subset of a large social network, and these contacts' associations to different social circles enables us exploring inside behavior of the underlying ego network. Normally, these social circles contain multiple hierarchies in them and many times the social circles at the second or lower level in the hierarchy are non-mutually exclusive. In this work, we propose an intuitive design solution to visualize an ego network with associated social circles, where the inside Chord diagram represents the contacts and their relations in an ego network while the outside arcs represent the associated social circles, keeping their hierarchies and the non-mutually exclusive property. Our HiSoC-Vis tool provides a number of interaction and filtering options to make the resulting visualization more intuitive and customizable.