Visual Mapping of Relationships

[Abraham Heinemann]

Hi, I have looked around the OAC and have not found a place that someone is looking into visually mapping networks of interactions between people. If there is one please direct me. Otherwise I have picked to place this with Visual Anthropology as that is how I think of it, even though from my limited experience Visual Anthropology seems mostly to do with Video and Photography.

I have just finished a dissertation on fish, fishers, and fishing in Turkish Cyprus. I did not get enough to fully explore the aspect I was aiming for, however I am planning on continuing to do so with that data as an experiment in visual mapping as a complement linear text.

What I am interested in is whether anyone has/is or knows of attempts are directly applying ethnographic data into visual maps/models in a complex ways. Not to simply produce visualisations that all look like exploding networks, but actually using the specific ethnographic context to guide the type and style of visualization to be made, and then piecing it together as a either a partial frame-in-time or more dynamic temporal version. It would allow the viewer to see such things as complex systems that 'entitize' out of groups of interactions, depending on the ethnographic data and anthropologists approach one could visually trace things e.g. discourses in peoples conversation, proximity of people/actors by economic or social relation, extent of agency exertion between numbers of people within a certain context etc etc

Now I guess the classic kinship maps are/were something along these lines, but don't seem to have spawned much offspring themselves. I am aware that there are many implications of such representations, but no more than in text as expressed in 'Writing Culture'.

To give some visual background I am thinking somewhere in the region similar to stamens work but ethnographically sensitive. My personal inspiration comes from having studied Art for a year and then moving in to Genetics for a while where I had to play with stuff like molymod, then doing a module in chemistry on what this type of stuff means. I am now finishing up in socialanth, and got partly influenced by ANT. I did some coursework using mind-mapping software to lay out interviews and see some interesting relations. I also say PhD students tagging there interview transcripts for better recall in a software that escapes my mind at present, and not using the capability of dynamically visualising the tagging relations. Then during fieldwork ended up understanding things within complex sets of intersubjective relationships, with a particular emphasis on agency in the case of my study, and I now imagine a photo-text-network-temporally dynamic piece.

Anyways anyone get a similar vibe or suggestions...

[John McCreery]

Abraham, I am rushing out the door to catch a plane. But if you do a Google search for "John McCreery SlideShare," you will find several examples of what you may be looking for. Additional searches for "social network analysis visualization" should turn up tons of stuff.

[Keith Hart]

Avi, I would recommend approaching this topic through the diagram as a method of visualizing abstract relationships. The key player in the history of anthropology was WHR Rivers, the inventor of the genealogical method in the course of the 1898 Torres Strait expedition. I like especially John Berger's Success and Failure of Picasso for his discussion of the diagram and cubism in scientific and artistic modernism.

[Patrícia Freire]

Abraham, i am working in ethnografic data visualization in GoogleEarth. can you send me your mail?

[Abraham Heinemann]

I misplaced this post of mine! But now back to it.

Firstly thanks John, I found them on slideshare and plan to get to grips with the software you used. They have been a great source of practical thought.

I am aware of the masses on social network analysis, but there is not so much outside of 'online social network' visualizations with a generic artificial appearance. I am thinking of generating visualizations that in their aesthetic are ethnographically derived and sensitive, and also having to use none online network that have been pieced together during participant observation.

Thankyou Keith for sending me back to basics, hadn't thought of doing that, most definitely where I should start.

Hi Patricia, sounds cool? could you maybe give an example?

[Abraham Heinemann]

Had to just share this that I came across http://www.tartanmetrics.com/researchprogram.html