Check out the visualization here.

Motivation

I got the idea for this project when a friend was looking for a thesis advisor. Since he was in ECE, he had to find an advisor within the department or a faculty affiliate. There isn’t a great way to find who is affiliated with who besides going to the department website and looking at people’s bio so I thought making a network visualization would be useful (and fun) thing to do.

How I did it

You can find the code here. A tutorial of the process is given in a series of posts:

1. Scraping the data
2. Creating the network
3. Visualizing
4. Visualizing 2.0

Things to note from the d3 viz

• Size of departmental nodes is determined by out-degree
• The distance between the department nodes is based on number of affiliated people (e.g., ECE is really close to CSL since lots of people are in both)
• Some departments have employees with no affiliations so they are floating by themselves endlessly in space (how lonely)