I chose to analyze the Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere project. In this project, the nodes were all the people involved in pre-revolutionary groups, while the edges represented how people were connected in the groups. The nodes being broken down to just affiliation shows how much power affiliation has over the positioning of nodes. The centrality of Paul Revere is also an indicator of how involved Paul Revere was in this pre-revolutionary time. This project also shows how central of a figure he was in these networks. It is pretty interesting to see how, with metadata, Healy was able to build such a vast and diverse network.
This visualization really focused around Paul Revere and then uses the number of shared members as a way to qualify the strength of groups. People are linked through groups, and groups are created by the people who are all linked together. The more isolated a node, the fewer connections they have. The more people who are linked, the stronger the group is, and one of the central figures in the networks is always Paul Revere. The visualization helps to show how certain individuals played a key role in connecting people across different groups. Without these key figures, the structure of the network might look very different, with many smaller, more fragmented groups.
I think that this type of analysis shows how the dominant force in America back then was heavily dominated by men. I think it would be interesting to see more in-depth labels of the groups and possibly a timeline of how the groups converged or diverged over time. A timeline would also produce a more storied visualization of the groups and American history. It could also help reveal patterns in how political and social movements formed, grew, or even disappeared.
