SONIVIS Persona
From SONIVIS:Wiki
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Contents |
SONIVIS primary persona
- Richard M. Watkins
- 29 years
- PhD student
- Research in Social Computing, especially evolution of virtual communities
- BA Social Science, M.S. in Computer Science
- unmarried
Richard is PhD student at the Department of Computer Science at a middle-sized university. He is in the middle of his Phd thesis, has already defined his main area of interest and his general research questions. Richard has different data sets from different virtual communities. He is mainly interested to explore these datasets in terms of their existing network structure and topics. For this he is looking for a tool that should allow him to import his data sets easily but at the same time that allows him to extend, if necessary, existing measures and visualizations without a huge programming effort. Richard has some programming experiences but he rather likes a "ready-to-go" tool. However, if the development effort were adequate in terms of the actual outcome, he wouldn't be afraid of extending an existing solution. Richard would like to have easy to use software, which installation routine that already sets all necessary parameters to run the software. He does not care about the operating system. Furthermore, he very appreciates a complete documentation of the software tool. Therefore, before he decides to use certain software he has a look on available resources. The software should allow him to explore large networks (<10,000). The level of interactivity should be as high as possible. Rather then having plain network pictures he prefers animated networks, which can be changed at run time.
Bene's changes
I'd like to change a few properties on this persona, because I think we should try to reach scientists outside the computer sciences. Maybe some researcher from social science that has some money to hire students for programming jobs. He is more focused on usability, but at the same time extensibility of the software to integrate new data sources and analysis.
Robert's other persona
SONIVIS secondary persona
Max M. 28 years Developer for (web) applications with a user centric focus and social network related software
Max is a developer with customers in several areas dealing with software that enables its users to emerge in social networks. Developing mainly web applications <name> has developed an interest in the dynamics of the networks he is working on and developing for. As a developer he has access to the complete datasets of the networks he wants to explore. He is looking for a tool to visualize en explore those datasets that allows him to show his customers changes in the networks structures over time after adding or changing specific features within the software carrying the social network. He is looking for a tool that does just that and is open source so he can add features according to his needs. Being a developer the programming effort is not really an issue but he appreciates well documented and thought out interfaces to program with. The software he is looking for should scale well for the networks he is handling (10k - 30k nodes) and should produce good looking visualizations to please his customers. He does not care too much about usability as he is willing to learn new tools but the threshold should be as low as possible.
Comments Anne
I think Richard is also interested in exploring the evolution of his virtual communities. He wants to explore the dependencies of special inputs/outcomes to this virtual community in time. Therefore he is especially interested in methods for manipulating his data set dynamically with a easy to use software.
"Richard is PhD student at the Department of Computer Science at a
middle-sized university. He is in the middle of his Phd thesis, has
already defined his main area of interest and his general research
questions. Richard has different data sets from different virtual
communities. He is mainly interested to explore these datasets in terms
of their existing network structure and topics. For this he is looking"
Should we extend topics? I understand topics as characteristics of the community, is that right? Are these measures that for example include the size of the community (content, members)?
