The workshop is designed to provide both theoretical and hands-on experience of the new network science and rules for using network visualisation for the analysis of large data resources.

The first part of the workshop will introduce the theoretical rationale for the network, including its origin and main analytical categories. This will be followed by a presentation of network visualisation applications, both in research projects and cultural activities.

The second part of the workshop will provide a more practical approach by introducing the participants to Gephi, currently the most popular network visualisation software package, as we discuss the key points relating to Gephi’s interface and its open ‘plug-in’ structure. The participants will also learn how to format and input data into the programme. The final stage will include formatting and filtering the network as well as exporting visualisations into various graphic formats.

The workshop will conclude with the participants learning some open tools that can be used for data scrapping from websites and social networking sites and being introduced to software packages for retrieving relational data from e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube. The data thus collected will be visualised in network form.

The workshop is designed for anyone interested in using network visualisations in their own cultural, research and exploratory activities.