IRC Arcs

A simple visualization of IRC communication behavior: Who is talking to whom? Or, more appropriately: Who is namedropping whom?

… where a reference is a message from a user containing the name of another user.

Arcs are directional and drawn clockwise: In the upper half of a graph they point from left to right, in the bottom half from right to left. Arc strength corresponds to the number of references from the source to the target.

This visualization favors strong social connections over sociability: Frequent references between the same two users feature more prominently than combined references from several sources to a single target.

1. "Post Idol"

Emphasis on active users.

Irc Circles Incoming
Sorted by amount of incoming references
Irc Circles Outgoing
Sorted by amount of outgoing references
Irc Circles Ratio
Sorted by rate of incoming/outgoing references
Irc Circles Name
Sorted by user name
Irc Circles Unsorted
Unsorted

2. "Egalitarian lineup"

Inverted semantics of circle color and circle size.

Irc Circles Incoming
Sorted by amount of incoming references
Irc Circles Outgoing
Sorted by amount of outgoing references
Irc Circles Ratio
Sorted by rate of incoming/outgoing references
Irc Circles Name
Sorted by user name
Irc Circles Unsorted
Unsorted

Martin Dittus 2006-09-30.

The graphs were created with Processing.

The visualization concept is based on research by Martin Wattenberg.