While at the U. of Michigan I took a social network analysis class taught by Lada Adamic. For the final project I analyzed the dissertation author and committee relationships in the MPACT database. The initial compilation and analysis of the MPACT database was presented in Marchionini et al. (2006). MPACT initially collected dissertation authors, advisors, and committee members for dissertations in information and library schools. I presented my course project as a short paper/poster at the ASIST Annual Meeting.

First, the dissertation advisor network generated using GUESS (I was amused I had named the image file “advhairball”):

For the actual poster I presented at ASIST, I generated an alternate visualization using Graphviz, with some cleaning up with Adobe Illustrator. My interest being in the “generations” of dissertation advisors and advisees, I went for a genealogical presentation. showing generations over time. I can’t say I am entirely satisfied with the end result. Perhaps it’s time to play around with the dataset a bit more, using something like Tableau.

(Click on image to see larger size version of poster.)