The following screens show one way of looking at data in Mike's email. We'll start out by looking at Mike's worldview, which shows all the links between different people in Mike's world. Next, we will take a look at some specific examples and trends that can be seen by examining regions of his Social networks. Finally, we'll examine one particular cluster of interest.

For all these images, lines represent links between two people and baby names indicate a person. Normally one would see the email addresses of the individuals, but we've used baby names to protect their privacy. It's easy to underestimate the power of these graphs when you do not see the addresses, but when we showed Mike these images we were amazed at how much information he was able to glean from them.

The following color chart applies to all these images. We color coded the email address by which Mike knew the individual; there are five major colors representing the five major facets that Mike felt the addresses encompassed. Within each major category, we assigned slightly different colors to different addresses, thus you will see some slight variation in the colors. (Bulk refers to mailing list messages.)

F1. Mike's worldview. This image represents everyone that Mike knows and is aware of. There are approximately 4,000 different individuals spread between some one hundred clusters. As can be seen, there are a few clusters which contain the majority of the people that Mike knows and many clusters that contain only a handful of people.

Note the colors of these clusters. By far and large, each cluster is of a homogenous color - several clusters of blue, for example, show us that Mike knows several clusters of people from school, and that these clusters do not know of each other. In Mike's case, we see that the fragments of his social networks are roughly corrolated with the function by which they know Mike. This separation in Mike's social network makes sense for an individual -- understand that if we were to graph the email communcation patterns at a company, we'd hope to see connections between these different clusters.

F2. Mike's Worldview, closer. With this image, we begin our journey of exploring Mike's social network. We'll be looking at specific regions of this image, which is just a close-up of F1. Note that the software is interactive and allows for exploring different regions, and that we're limited to screen shots on this web page.

F3. A Simple Cluster in Mike's network looks something like this: here we see four different clusters of people, each connected by one link. When real names are exposed, this graph shows the connection of four distinct people Mike knows, and parts of those people's social networks, as revealed by emails they have sent out to their friends.

Note that the coloring for the majority of these nodes is consistent, with a slight variation in shade occuring in the lower portion. Again, we see that the people Mike knows tend to know each other in the same way that they know Mike.

F4. A Complex Cluster in Mike's network shows us what happens when a lot of people are known in two different contexts that eventually converge. In the center of this image, we see that Mike's friends (blue) tend to know other of Mike's friends, but that there is some overlap between people he knows from school (brown). We'll revisit this portion of the image in later images.

The cluster in the lower left corner contains an excellent example of "bridge" individuals: two people who know Mike in different ways and who know each other, but do not necessarily know that the other knows Mike. There is a link between the green cluster (people who know Mike through his website work) and the brown cluster. Were Mike needing to keep these identites separate, it would be extremely important that the green and brown bridge individuals not become aware that the other know Mike.

F5. The Complex Cluster, closer, begins to reveal the strucuter of Mike's social network at school and of post-school friends. Here we see that there are twelve links connecting Mike's friends to people he knows from school -- and that clearly there is a strong connection between these two communities.

F6. Color variations within a complex cluster show us where different social settings are mixed together. Here, we see that some of Mike's friends seem to be more aware of people from his school than of his other friends. The occasional blue clusers inside the brown (and the brown clusters inside the blue) are expected in this case. A brown clump inside a blue region indicates that there is a circle of people who all know each other and know Mike, but have ended up knowing Mike's friends better than people from school.

Colors only denote how they know Mike, not how they know each other, thus when we see four or five separate clusters that are all the same color, this only means that those groups are not aware of each other but still know Mike in the same social setting.