Dynamic Network Plaid: a tool for the analysis of dynamic networks

Network data that changes over time can be very useful for studying a wide range of important phenomena, from how social network connections change to epidemiology. However, it is challenging to analyze, especially if it has many actors, connections or if the covered timespan is large with rapidly changing links (e.g., months of changes with changes at second resolution). In these analyses one would often like to compare many periods of time to others, without having to look at the full timeline. To support this kind of analysis we designed and implemented a technique and system to visualize this dynamic data. The Dynamic Network Plaid (DNP) is designed for large displays and based on user-generated interactive timeslicing on the dynamic graph attributes and on linked provenance-preserving representations. We present the technique, interface and the design/evaluation with a group of public health researchers investigating non-suicidal self-harm picture sharing in Instagram.