##Measuring Online Behaviors
A subset of my dissertation study of an online health support community. The portrait of each members’ identity is based in the collective narrative along with individually shared personal experiences (Davison et al, 2000). Social comparison theory, introduced by Festinger in the 1950s proposed that social behaviors could be predicted largely on the basis of the assumption that individuals seek for and maintain a sense of normalcy. This theory suggests that in times of uncertainty, conversations between parties would increase as people sought others’ opinions about how they should be thinking or feeling (Festinger, 1954).
##NetworkX
I presented a tutorial at PyData Silicon Valley on rendering charts. NetworkX is a Python language library that allows you to measure social network structure of a dataset by incorporating two libraries: (1) numpy, which allows for matric calculations, and also (2) matplotlib, for generating figures
In the tutorial I show users how to install the library, and give an overview of some of basic features. Then I show how to customize a graphic to show the “growth” of a network. This gives a storyboard view of presenting your data more as a story to help you connect with your audience.
Code
https://github.com/katychuang/PyData2013-SNATutorial
###References