Internet Relay Chat
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Important Citations
Internet relay chat is a system that allows groups of people to collaborate and chat from anywhere in the world. Clearly defined by several RFC documents, it is arguably the most standard real-time chat system currently in use. This work describes a method of inferring the social network of a group of IRC users in a channel. An IRC bot is used to monitor a channel and perform a heuristic analysis of events to create a mathematical approximation of the social network. From this, the bot can produce a visualization of the inferred social network on demand. These visualizations reveal the structure of the social network, highlighting connectivity, clustering and strengths of relationships between users. Animated output allows viewers to see the evolution of the social network over time. Some novel ideas for future work are discussed, showing other useful applications of this system.
[Paul Mutton, 2004]
Visualization of social networks is important, as it allows the viewer to determine facts about nodes and relationships between nodes more rapidly than examining the raw mathematical model.
[Paul Mutton, 2004]
It must be noted that the accuracy of these approximations is very subjective by nature and that the social network derived from the heuristics can be no more than a good guess. However, in practice, we find that the results are generally good.
[Paul Mutton, 2004]
Before we visualize the inferred social network, it is possible to calculate results and draw conclusions by examining the graph theoretic structure.
[Paul Mutton, 2004]
The accuracy of the social network diagrams is a subjective matter. Casual testing has shown participants to be happy with the output, often agreeing with whatthey interpret from the diagrams.
[Paul Mutton, 2004]