Jon Stahl’s Journal

“Danah Boyd”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/01/18/mailing_list_visualizations.html links to social circles, a tool from marcos weskamp that can subscribe itself to a mailing list and produce some simple pictures that map the traffic on the list.

Danah raises the obvious (and important) concern about the temptation to create public visualizations of private listservs.

And, in a related post, Danah also asks “why visualize social networks?”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/01/18/why_visualize_social_networks.html

I’d like to map some of the 600 “email discussion lists”:http://lists.onenw.org that ONE/Northwest hosts for the Northwest environmental movement. I think this would help the list participants (i.e. Northwest environmental activists) do a better job of identifying the “rising stars” of the movement. And I definitely think it would help newcomers to a collaborative network identify the key players.

I would love to see an inexpensive (or better yet open-source) version of a visualization tool like social circles or Valids Krebs’ “InFlow”:http://www.orgnet.com/inflow3.html. Roland Piquapaille presents a “list of social-network mapping tools”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/03/16.html#a398 which is about 10 months old.

Tags: Email