NcoVis: A Visual Analysis Framework for Exploring Academic Collaboration Networks under New Collaborative Relationships

Abstract

Academic collaboration has become one of the topics of large-scale social network analysis. The information extracted from academic collaboration also shows the contextual value in combination with other data. For academic collaborative social networks with intricate collaborative relationships, previous research methods mainly focused on network structure and community discovery, lacking in mining the characteristics of relationships in collaborative networks. There were some limitations in the research perspective. In this work, we propose a collaborative relationship representation method that is more suitable for academic collaborative social networks. It marks the attribute characteristics of nodes in collaborative relationships and highlights collaborative relationships in visualization. By adopting this new representation of collaborative relationships, we designed a visual analysis framework NcoVis, to visualize academic collaborative social networks. We further visually analyze the link relationship groups guided by nodes, and explore the potential representation of the structure and attribute characteristics of link relationships, so that analysts can explore the theme and structural change characteristics of link relationships, communities and the whole network in collaborative social networks. To prove the proposed framework, we conducted a case study on the academic collaboration literature data set, and analyzed the questionnaire with Likert scale through the user evaluation experiment, which verified the effectiveness of our method and the practicability of NcoVis.