Explore the Marvel Universe Social Graph
From the post (but be sure to see the images):
From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, Kai Chang, Tom Turner, and Jefferson Braswell were tuning their visualizations and had a lot of fun exploring Spiderman or Captain america ego network. They came with these beautiful snapshots and created a zoomable web version using the Seadragon plugin. The won the “Most aesthetically pleasing visualization” category, congratulations to Kai, Tom and Jefferson for their amazing work!
The datasets have been added to the wiki Datasets page, so you can play with it and maybe calculate some metrics like centrality on the network. The graph is pretty large, so be sure to increase you Gephi memory settings with > 2GB.
I am sure the Marvel Comic graph is a lot more amusing but I can’t help but wonder about ego networks that combined:
- Lobbyists registered with the US government
- Elected and appointed officials and their staffs, plus staff’s families
- Washington social calendar reports
- Political donations
- The Green Book
Topic maps could play a role in layering contracts, legislation and other matters onto the various ego networks.