Explore the Marvel Universe Social Graph

This week end at the data in sight hackathon in San Francisco, one of the winning team worked with Gephi and the cool Marvel dataset provided by Infochimps.

From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, Kai Chang, Tom Turner, and Jefferson Braswell were tuning their visualizations and had a lot of fun exploring Spiderman or Captain america ego network. They came with these beautiful snapshots and created a zoomable web version using the Seadragon plugin. The won the “Most aesthetically pleasing visualization” category, congratulations to Kai, Tom and Jefferson for their amazing work!

The datasets have been added to the wiki Datasets page, so you can play with it and maybe calculate some metrics like centrality on the network. The graph is pretty large, so be sure to increase you Gephi memory settings with > 2GB.

Data in sight – hackathon in San Francisco

Creative Commons, the Netherlands Office for Science and Technology and Swissnex San Francisco is organizing a weekend hackathon about data visualization in which Mathieu Bastian will give a demo of Gephi. The event is called “data in sight: making the transparent visual“, and runs June 24-26 at Adobe in SOMA (in San Francisco).

Join us for data in sight: making the transparent visual, a hands-on data visualization competition held June 25th and 26th, 2011, at the Adobe Systems, Inc. offices in San Francisco’s SoMa District. Open to coders, programmers, developers, designers, scientists, members of the media—anyone who believes that data is divine and has ideas for bringing it to life.

During the hackaton, Mathieu will help teams to code Gephi plug-ins or mashups. Ideas go from live data streaming to layouts, filters or web widgets. If you have ideas, please come to the forum to open a discussion.

Visit the website to learn more about the schedule, data available and advisory committee.