Mapping Projects, poeple, and orgs: Software to map square and bimodal networks

Sent to Socnet.

Hi,

I sketched on a napkin the other day a “map” of social innovaiton at my campus.

On it I had as “nodes”

• – Projects
• – Actors (like students, faculty, centers)
• – Amorphous constituencies like “faculty” from which actors could come, or whcih projects could serve or interest.

I drew some ties for relations like

• – created
• – fund
• – are interested in

I was thinking, I could make a “figure” of this, but any new data would involve manual additions.

Is there a software tool anyone recommends?

In mu ind, it is like a hybrid of a square matrix, like all the actors to the actors, and a bimodal network, actors or constituencies to projects.

Plus, I was thinking of differing relations which could be visualized.  So, maybe behind the visualization are different matrices that can be added or removed from the visualization.

Finally, I was thinking of this evolving over time.

I realize some of this relationships may not theoretically make sense with some kinds of lay out algorithims.  For example, I am not sure what it would mean to try to find the most central node when there are both actor-actor and actor-object (bimodal) relations, but at the moment, I was more looking for a tool to visualize these relations and dynamically update data to create newer visualizations.

I added a picture if that helps…