Visualizing social patterns in virtual environments on a local and global scale

Authors:
Katy Börner;Shashikant Penumarthy;Bonnie Jean DeVarco;Carol Kerney
Affiliations:
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN;Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN;MediaTertia, Santa Cruz, CA;San Diego County Office of Education, San Diego, CA
Venue:
Digital Cities'03 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Information Technologies for Social Capital: cross-Cultural Perspectives
Year:
2003

Citing 4
Cited 1

Empathic communities: reaching out across the Web

interactions
Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities

Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
Twin Worlds: Augmenting, Evaluating, and Studying Three-Dimensional Digital Cities and Their Evolving Communities

Revised Papers from the Second Kyoto Workshop on Digital Cities II, Computational and Sociological Approaches
Visualizing Chat Log Data Collected in 3-D Virtual Worlds

IV '01 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Visualisation

A review of interoperability and possibilities for data analysis from virtual world environments

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Today a wide variety of virtual worlds, cities, and gaming environments exist and become part of life of their human inhabitants. However, our understanding of how technology influences the way people can use these virtual places to access information, expertise, to socialize, etc. is very limited. Previous work [1-4] introduced a tool set that generates visualizations of user interaction data to support social navigation, aid designers of virtual worlds in the evaluation and optimization of world content and layout as well as the selection of interaction possibilities, and enables researchers to monitor, study, and research virtual worlds and their evolving communities. This paper applies an advanced version of this tool set to visualize and analyze local and global usage patterns in a virtual learning environment called LinkWorld. Resulting social visualizations have been used to inform a set of netiquette and reporting procedures, to fine tune training material and moderation guidelines, to analyze and report the progress of the LinkWorld project, and to create a ”social compass” for teachers, moderators and students who collaborate in this unique environment.