Graph Commons is happy to share the network mapping workshop notes with you. Below, you will find a useful guide, conceptual and practical insights for making and understanding network maps.

This is the first part of a 3-part guide on mapping, understanding, and analyzing networks. We will focus on the design and understanding of complex networks through mapping and visual analysis in order to expand your thinking about the network as a creative and critical medium. For the other parts, view “Mapping Networks” and “Reading & Analyzing Network Maps“.

Understanding complex systems

Complexity is characterized as something with many autonomous parts interacting with each other in multiple ways. Signaling of neurons in our body, messaging of devices in the telecommunication infrastructure, transactions between agents in markets, social formations among people are some generic examples of complex systems. If we want to understand a complex system, we first need a map of its relationship diagram that is composed of nodes and links and makes a network form, which is by its very nature the fabric of most complex systems.

A network diagram offers a “common language” that is both visual and mathematical. So, from a network map, we can get qualitative information by reading its actors and relations, as well as do quantitative analysis by computing its connection structure. In fact, we can use this common language to study systems that may differ widely in their nature, appearance, or scope. For example, rather three different systems 1) devices sending messages to each other, 2) film actors connected through taking roles in the same movies, 3) organizations connected through partnerships may have exactly the same network structure. While the nature of the nodes and the links differs widely, each network has the same graph representation, consisting of 4 nodes and 4 links. We can use this simple method to begin studying a variety of complex systems.

Why is network logic significant today?

Let us look at why do networks matter today, although they existed in every society in the history. It is known that 3000 years ago the ancient Phoenician and Greek colonies formed their trade routes and built a network of harbors in the Mediterranean Sea. Whereas today, in the same geography, submarine cables carry messages and enable a global communication system. What we have today, is not just networks as analog or bare life happenings, but networks that are digitized, like the way many aspects of life is digitized. Thus, networks matter today, because electronic and software based communication systems made networks measurable. Only in this day and age, networks are able to reach a global scale and infiltrate into every part of our life. With today’s advanced information technologies, the metrics of network effect have become trackable and measurable even in one’s daily course of life, at the same structuring the social world as such.

Use of complex networks

In fact, we all experience the network effect, from email to e-commerce, from social networking to banking, from telecommunication to transportation. We all acknowledged the fact that the world is complex more than ever. It feels both flat –we can reach anyone anytime– and chaotic –our inbox is inundated with information from all directions. Sometimes we are opportunistic about the internet, talking about it as a global good, other times we are pessimistic knowing that we are all under surveillance all the time. In such an antagonistic world that is at once flat and chaotic, the question arises again: Where does power reside and circulate?

Additionally, the state’s tactics in partnership with certain corporations to monitor its own citizens through what has been called ‘the big data’, the NSA leaks and so on and so forth have also attracted our attention towards an inaccessible but quite magical tool of knowing and predicting of what people want. This indeed was possible through understanding the interrelated or linkable structure of the information generated by many, but as said only open to the reach of a handful of institutions. In other words, network logic has been mystified in the eyes of the public. Only experts in certain fields have been aggregating large amount of data and using scientific tools for visualizing and analyzing it on a relational basis. Neither the relational data nor the tools for visualization and analysis are accessible to common people.

However, it is a myth that common people has no access to data. Yet, we are the data for the governments and corporations who continuously sense our activity. In fact, interconnecting individual data points around us, collective mapping of relationships that we can observe, would indeed render complex structures visible, thus discussable. Together we can map relationships and unfold the issues that impact us and our communities. The Graph Commons platform is a step to allow you to do so.

At Graph Commons, you can collectively compile data about the topics you are interested, define and categorize relations and map the issues that impact you and your community on a user-friendly interface. Graph Commons members have been using the platform for investigative journalism, data research, civic activism, strategizing, organizational analysis, curating content and what not. We believe you will find a unique way to use Graph Commons in your own connected world.