We live in a age of social networks. Independent of wherever we go, we are always connected to the people we want to. Added to that we maintain different types of contacts depending upon the people we befriend. However, most of these connections are implicit and are not disclosed for the reasons of privacy.But we might end up in a situation where we need to investigating these connections becomes a necessity.
The figure shown above represents the pattern of e-mail communication inside Enron at the time of Scandal. The size of the nodes represents the relative importance of the personnel in the network and the thickness of the edges represent the number of messages communicated. At the first sight it is clearly palpable that Tim Belden is in the middle of the communication during the crisis with a few others like Amy FitzPatrick and Chirstopher F. Calger playing an important role in the crisis communication. Thus we can clearly identify the crisis leaders just from the visualization of the network.
The example in the previous paragraph is one of a rare case and company e-mail networks are not investigated unless a scandal of the sort of Enron breaks out. However, in our daily life we come across many networks. Twitter is an example of a network which if visualized can unravel daily communication patterns. Of course, we have other networks in the form of Wikipedia - where authors collaboratively edit articles and YouTube- where users post comments and replies. An analysis of all of these can reveal significant hidden information that can be exploited in various area like advertising, investigation, prediction etc ..
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