DEV Talk: Social Networks and Cartograms: Visualizing the Social World, Friday, February 22, 2013

DEV’s first talk of the Winter 2013 season is Friday, February 22nd by Mark Newman and is followed by a small group forum with Mark. Please RSVP to these events separately. Social Networks and Cartograms: Visualizing the Social World Mark Newman, PhD February 22, 2013 12:00-1:00 PM 3755 School of Public Health Building I This talk will describe work in two related areas: social networks and cartograms. The former, which includes the familiar on-line social networks like Facebook, but many other things, as well, has become a particularly active area of research in the last 15 years and presents unique problems for visualization. How do you visualize and understand the structure of a network with a billion nodes? The latter focuses on the interplay between the social and the geographic. Laying human data, such as population data or electoral data, on a standard map of a country or the world can lead to wildly misleading visualizations, because of the extremely uneven population distribution. Cartograms provide a way around this and, in the process, give us some intriguing visualizations of the current state of the planet. *IMPORTANT: To join us for lunch at this talk, please RSVP on the UMDEV CTools site. Please email Caren Weinhouse cweinhouse@gmail.com to be added to the site. Data Visualization Community Forum with Mark Newman February 22, 2013 1:00-2:00 PM 3755 School of Public Health Building I Join a group of interested community members from across campus to discuss current data visualization challenges and interests in your own work. Participants may look forward to hearing innovative, cross-disciplinary solutions for their research projects, as well as fostering new collaborations across campus. Please come prepared to answer the question, “What data visualization challenges and interests do you have in your own work?” About the Speaker: Mark Newman, Paul Dirac Collegiate Professor of Physics                                               Department of Physics and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/ http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/346315/description/Red_state_blue_state http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html About the DEV Seminar Series: The DEV (Data Exploration through Visualization) Seminar Series provides a platform for an interdisciplinary community of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students to explore effective data visualization approaches for communicating with scientists from a range of fields and with non-scientists. Designed as a series of alternating invited talks and informal, student-led workshops, the aim is to bring together experts and practitioners with researchers who are facing the challenge of conveying complex information to different audiences through visualization, with the intention of stimulating explorations and conversations that enable knowledge to be shared and built upon.