dimitris kalamaras

math, social network analysis, web dev, free software…

SocNetV 0.51: changes, new logo, and RPM packages

Last Friday, I released version 0.50 of Social Networks Visualiser (SocNetV) and version 0.51 followed already (yesterday), fixing an important (and yet embarrassing) bug in Graph::createDistanceMatrix() method.

IMHO, this new version is the first really usable version of this little application. With it you can draw mathematical graphs (social networks, to be precise, since the focus is more on Social Network Analysis than on Graph Theory), by pointing and clicking, load existing networks of most popular formats (Pajek, GraphML, GraphViz, UCINET, etc), create random networks (Small Worlds, Erdos-Renyi, Ring Lattices, etc), compute actor centralities (Betweeness, Closeness, Graph, etc) and clustering coefficients, select a different network layout based on these centralities (or Spring-Embedder models), and finally export your work to PDF, BMP or PNG file formats, without crashes (unlike earlier releases). A complete workflow, that is!

I am really proud of this progress (if not amazed) since I didn’t expect it to come this far 5 winters ago when I was playing with Qt toolkit while I was on army service in Evros 🙂 Yet, this application has really evolved in my spare time, and seems to be useful to some people (mostly academia).

To celebrate this new release, I prepared RPMs for both Fedora 10 and openSUSE 11.1 distros. Serafeim Zanikolas maintains already an older .deb package in Debian ‘experimental’ (and soon in Sid), while Markos Chandras just added SocNetV to qting-edge overlay, which also houses all new Qt4 and KDE4 software. Ubuntu users may add my Launchpad PPA (older version) to their repos or opt to compile from source (it’s really easy!). Meanwhile, 0.51 is the first version for which we provide a Windows zipped archive with executables (although I cant say I really tested it :P)…Oh, and we now have a much more polished and ad hoc logo (handmade with Gimp/Inkscape of course):

Nice, isn’t it? 😛

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4 Comments

  1. Neri Martinez

    Hello Prof. Kalamaras!

    In first i want to sent you my best regards and my sincere appreciation for your work with this application.
    Im a undergraduated sociology student from Mexico, and recently i’ve become trying to analyze social networks. Here in my college we use the Pajek software to perform this tasks, but sincerely it’s pretty hard to deal with that burden of codes in the notepad. I was looking for an application whose enabled me to visualize and analyze networks in a simple way. And praise lord, you appeared.
    But, unfortunately the solution provided to me through SocnetV software, was not for my colleages and profesors; because among the unwritten policies in my colleges, every single pieces of software must to run under Windows OS. Misadvantages of underdevelopment 🙁
    So as far as i can, i comment and share the finding (and usage) of SocnetV; but im afraid it was not enough to solve our trouble, because we cant migrate some of institutional computing equipments into linux. A shame indeed.

    So that happened between october-november 2008.

    How big and glad was my surprise yesterday when i was adviced about the new release of socnetv, and the “windows” surprise.
    As soon as posible i try to install the software but i had some troubles, specifically with Qt libraries.
    Until today i cant fix the trouble.
    Im not much in programming but i’d like to help in some way to “transport” this little marvel into windows.

    Any way; in my own name and my colleages name, i want to thank you for the effort and the valuable contribution to social scientists community, specialy for countries like mexico where is hard to find powerfull, reliable, and really user friendly software for tasks like social network analysis.

    Thanks in advance for reading this lines, and if i can provide you some help (i insist im not much in programming), please let me know.
    [email protected]

    Best Regards from Mexico

  2. Neri, thanks for the nice comment and the encouraging words.

    As for the problem, I just sent you an email with some advice. In a nutshell, I think you may have to download the Qt4 libraries for Windows from
    http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/opensource/appdev/windows-cpp

    before you run SocNetV

  3. Dimitris, I just added your program on the official gentoo portage tree. Sorry but I couldnt find your e-mail to inform you, so I am posting over here. Hope that’s ok.

    http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/app-misc/socnetv/

    Keep me posted for future releases in case I forget to bump it 🙂

    Thanks

  4. Thanks for this.

    Indeed, my e-mail is missing from my blog – it’s in the README/AUTHORS/LICENSE files inside the tarball though 😉

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