Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Social Capital Simulation (Online)

The past couple days I have been working on an online social capital simulation that was created primarily with Javascript. Currently, it calculates social capital in the same manner as the excel version, however, it is more powerful as it allows you to set how many nodes you would like in the network, it dynamically creates a visual graph of the network, and it is accessible online.
I used Walter Zorn's High Performance JavaScript Vector Graphics Library to draw the network (i.e., nodes, lines, and text). This is an impressive library, which makes drawing with Javascript more pleasant than I originally expected. Also, to facilitate this project, I extended Zorn's library by adding getColor, getOpacity, and setOpacity methods. Furthermore, Michael Deardeuff and other Data Mining Lab members used their keen pattern finding skills to develop the mathematical equation for node placement in the graph.

Let me know how it works for you. I want to make this available so that it is easy to for people to get a feel for how we calculate social capital, which will allow us to refine our method.

No comments: