Ken Cherven

I fooled around with Gephi at work some months ago. It's one of the leading options that handles Social Network Analysis, a field that is taking off due to seemingly ubiquitous datasets due to academic publishing and social media. This book teaches you the basics of what Gephi has to offer vis-a-vis this field.

I found most interesting the idea of a temporally-based social network - i.e., one that grows over time. This is the root of DNA (Dynamic Network Analysis). Using this data, one can show how a graph changes over time.

The main dataset I use is comprised of academic scholars at my institution and partnering institutions. They collaborate together (or at least are commanded to do so), resulting in academic papers. This data is being used to monitor the fecundity of the minds in academic partnership. My data? Well, there wasn't much collaboration going on, so the entire academic partnership is overblown, unfortunately. It's time to be more deliberate about activities and co-authoring papers, I suppose.

Gephi is a powerful tool and can provide insights to its users. A book like this can teach someone the basics in a way that is not immediately obvious by the user interface. If you're into social network graphs or just charts in general, this provides an interesting aid to telling the story of your data.
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