NET-EXPO: A Gephi Plugin Towards Social Network Analysis of Network Exposure for Unipartite and Bipartite Graphs

HCI Int 2019 Posters (2019). 2019 Jul:1034:3-12. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-23525-3_1. Epub 2019 Jul 6.

Abstract

Social network analysis (SNA) concerns itself in studying network structures in relation to individuals' behavior. Individuals may be influenced by their network members in their behavior, and thus past researchers have developed computational methods that allow us to measure the extent to which individuals are exposed to members with certain behavior within one's social network, and that be correlated with their own behavior. Some of these methods include network exposure model, affiliation exposure model, and decomposed network exposure models. We developed a Gephi plugin that computes and visualizes these various kinds of network exposure models called NET-EXPO. We experimented with NET-EXPO on some social network datasets to demonstrate its pragmatic use in social network research. This plugin has the potential to equip researchers with a tool to compute network exposures in a user friendly way and simplify the process to compute and visualize the network data.

Keywords: Affiliation exposure model; Gephi; Human computer interaction; Network exposure model; Network science; Public health; Social network analysis; Software; Visualization.