I chose to take a deeper dive into the network analysis project of “Corruption and Reform” by Brian Sarnacki, which shows the social connections of the Grand Rapids elite. This project aimed to demonstrate the complex social environment in which reform developed, and how social connections and corruption might have influenced said reform.
The image below shows a combination of the Grand Rapids elite all on one network, but other visualizations on the website show individual networks of different elite groups, such as social welfare organizations and women’s clubs. In the image below, the larger circles, or nodes, are main organizations, while the smaller nodes are individual elite members of that group. The edges are the paths connecting individuals to the groups they’re in, so an individual never connects to another individual. It appears that only leaders or influential people in groups are shown, so individuals don’t appear to connect to more than two groups at a time.
For creating these visualizations of the networks, the membership information was collected from 1914 directories in the Grand Rapids Public Library’s Grand Rapids Federation of Women’s Literary Clubs collection (no. 20) and Chamber of Commerce collection (no. 46). The data was cleaned with Google Refine, and the visualizations were created using Gephi.
The site has some levels of interactivity. In the combined visualization, so are able to search for a certain group to show on the network, and when you hover over a circle, you can see the name of the individual or group they were a part of. You can also click on a circle to pull up their connections. However, information isn’t shown about the individual or group, only the connections between one another. If text showed after clicking a circle that explained who the individual or group was, a much clearer sense about Grand Rapids in the early 1900’s could be gathered from this project, and viewers would likely spend more time exploring the project with the added information.
1 thought on “Network Analysis: Corruption and Reform”
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I took a good look at this graph and reached the same conclusions that you did about how nodes are connected, what they represent and what they’re connected to. I think this graph is an excellent way of documenting persons of interest in a social sphere!