Temporal visualization of social network dynamics: prototypes for nation of neighbors

Information visualization is a powerful tool for analyzing the dynamic nature of social communities. Using Nation of Neighbors community network as a testbed, we propose five principles of implementing temporal visualizations for social networks and present two research prototypes: NodeXL and TempoVis. Three different states are defined in order to visualize the temporal changes of social networks. We designed the prototypes to show the benefits of the proposed ideas by letting users interactively explore temporal changes of social networks.