Visually Exploring Social Participation in Encyclopedia of Life

Social network visualization is useful for understanding the complex structure of collaborative efforts such as citizen science projects. It has been widely accepted by social network analysts for exploring and analyzing networks by visually showing their members, the relationships among them, and their behaviors and attributes. The strength of social network visualization can be increased even further, by incorporating the time dimension of evolving networks. We analyzed the conversation network of a collaborative citizen science web platform called the Encyclopedia of Life using dynamic network visualization methods. This paper shows how the temporal visualization was applied to the social collaboration analysis of EOL and presents the findings. We found that some EOL web site features increased the interactive as well as individual member activities. We also found evidence that EOL curator activities encouraged the activities of other members.