Talk:Lesson08

UCINET vs Gephi

Hi everyone, so Prof Kam has introduced use to a neat visualization tool "Gephi" and we even had a homework on it that helped us explore it further. I am currently taking social networks this semester and would like to share the program we are using in that class and perhaps give my two cents worth on the differences between the two.

Introducing UCINET

This is UCINET.(See Figure 1)



Figure 1

As with Gephi, UCINET is both a visualization and analytical tool used for social network analysis. To me, UCINET feels alot more user friendly. Unlike Gephi, we are able to interact with the interface more freely. Additionally, predefined filtering nodes make it easy for us to remove any isolates or choose which nodes to focus on. Another key feature I feel UCINET has power on is the analytical aspect of it. For a more complex statistical analysis of social network data, UCINET excels in this aspect compared to Gephi. Having said that, just from figure 1 alone, you might have guessed it, Gephi definitely does a better job at visualizing our data. UCINET generally provides visuals at its bare minimum and figure 1 kind of show cases the best its got. Thus, having experienced Gephi and UCINET, I realized that both softwares has its ups and downs and I feel that to get the best of both worlds, one should do analysis using UCINET and subsequently visualize it on Gephi. In this way, we get to enjoy both the analytical power from UCINET and the beautiful visuals from Gephi. If you are interested to test out UCINET, do follow this link (http://www.analytictech.com/ucinet/) and download the 30 day trial.

Oh and one more thing, I found another social network software called "NodeXL" too! I wonder how it compares with both UCINET and Gephi. From the looks of it, it seems to be a combination of both plus points from both softwares. Check it out here if you are interested! (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/)

- Timothy