Inferring and Visualizing Social Networks on Internet Relay Chat Paul Mutton Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent.CT2 7NF. United Kingdom. {
[email protected]} Abstract 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 paper 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 Figure 1 A typical IRC client between users. Animated output allows viewers to see the In addition to sending messages directly from one evolution of the social network over time. Some novel user to another, IRC users can join a set of channels, ideas for future work are discussed, showing other useful which are analogous to rooms. When a message is sent to applications of this system. a channel, all other users in the channel can see it. Figure 1 shows a list of channel names down the left hand side, Keywords: inferring social networks, with the user currently viewing the messages being sent visualization, animation, irc bot, heuristics, internet to the channel called “#java”. Each channel has a unique relay chat, spring embedder, shakespeare.