Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
the past decade, and the effort has been largely successful. The number of
foreign-bornplayersintheleaguehasgrowndramatically,andinternational
viewership has grown with it. Here you see a reflection of how social media
can extend the reach of a fan base and how the involvement of players born
abroad can help to grow strong communities of fans in other countries.
Monitoring this over time would provide valuable feedback on the progress
of these initiatives and may provide clues as to how to foster growth of those
communities.
By applying clique detection and by using grouping with convex hulls and
hiding links, a clear picture of social communities and involvement of key
social connectors emerges. Hulls provide crisp group boundaries when not
obscured by other geometry and leave color for expressing other facets of
the data. An additional advantage of convex hulls is that they can indicate
membership in more than one group, whereas a simple node color mapping
cannot.
Convexhullshavealotincommonwith
Venn diagrams
,whichalsodepict
overlapping groups. Venn diagrams are useful for summarizing community
size and overlap in a simple-to-understand form for executive briefing but,
unfortunately, do not scale well to more than three or four communities.
The Cytoscape graph tool includes a plug-in for rendering groups in a graph
as a Venn diagram for graphic export, but using the plug-in to illustrate
topic mentions by fans in this sample data hints at the limitations of this
approach. As shown in
Figure 11-19
,
several overlaps are missing. It is
interesting,though,toobservethat,fittingly,pointguardKyleLowry,whose
job it is to distribute the ball, overlaps the most with other players.
