I chose to analyze a collection of social connections of Grand Rapid’s own elite citizens and leaders, and how these social connections influenced reform in the city. There are four networks in this collection: banking, women’s networks, social welfare organizations, and general elite organizations. The project can be found here:
The first network in this collection is a visualization of Grand Rapids’ local banks’ board of directors. There are two nodes in this network: individual banks, represented with larger nodes to suggest high in-degree, and individual board members. The data was collected from the 1902 R.L. Polk & Company’s Grand Rapids city directory.
The second network depicts social connections between the social welfare organizations of Grand Rapids and their members/contributors, with the data coming from a 1914 directory at the Grand Rapids Public Library’s Grand Rapids Federation of Women’s Literary Clubs.
The third network shows social connections within local women’s clubs. This network revolves around one large node representing the Grand Rapids Federation of Women’s Clubs, and is composed of several clubs, each of which is connected to several different members. The clubs themselves are not connected to the GR Federation, however each club member is connected to it.
The final network combines the network of the Federation of Women’s Clubs and Social Welfare Organizations to portray a broader view of the city’s elite connections. Collected from 1914 directories in the Grand Rapids Public Library, this visualization mainly shows leadership among these various organizations and ties together connections found between the two individual networks.
For each of these networks, the colors and size of each node (organizations, clubs and people) were determined by modularity in class and centrality. All of the data found in this collection of networks was processed through Google Refine, an online tool used for cleaning and handling messy data. Overall, the last network that combines the Social Welfare Organizations and the Federation of Women’s Clubs is the most interesting, as we can see some ties between the networks, but we can also see some women’s organizations that are completely severed from the main network, implying that they potentially don’t affiliate with the city of Grand Rapids altogether, or they just don’t have ties with other elite groups.