The research focus of this dissertation is the analysis and visualization of individual or group ‘fields of interest’ and the connections between these interests and others’ in a networked group. Here a field of interest is derived from users’ self-generated ‘tagging’ data, extracted from systems such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and 43 Things. Of interest here are the relations between different data bodies: person to person, person to data, data to data.

The practical orientation of the project that accompanies this dissertation is to develop a definition that can be used to describe the above relations and offer a visualization system that will allow browsing and exploration of a relational network. A sample from del.icio.us provides the working dataset used for this project.

In supporting this work, the dissertation reviews approaches to understanding the group and the network as a social infrastructure, and the design and visualization methodologies that have tried to represent them. This discursive investigation is intended to enable a definition of an ‘interest model’, evaluating and describing the position, connections and relations of a network entity.

Read my Dissertation (pdf-format).