It’s good to stretch the ol’ brain once in a while. To that end, I popped in to MIT’s winter term to check out a workshop called “Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity.” I don’t pretend to understand all of what was discussed, but I was struck by the analogies between the social network mapping shown, and the data network mapping performed by tools like WhatsUp Gold.
Prof. Peter Gloor showed off a tool that takes input from email records or online communities to create maps of social or business interactions, and Chandrika Samarth showed a real-life case study of how such mapping can lead to real process improvements in a real workplace, in this case a hospital. Characteristics like “betweenness,” “connectedness” and “sharing” are important attributes of social network nodes, also known as people. The charts show the communication between people as lines of length and thickness corresponding to the frequency and intensity of the interaction. Interesting data visualization, indeed.
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