Visualizing Online Social Network Experiments

Abstract

The ability of humans to solve challenging tasks that require global coordination between many people is a problem of interest to many fields, from computer science to economics to social science. Online experiments allow research to take place on a large scale, and are conducive to being dynamic, and as a result, there has been widespread adoption of online experiment platforms to support network experiments. However, platforms lack support for visualizing complex networks, which makes it difficult to understand and run these experiments. In this project, I create a visualizer which builds on the PsyNet platform for running large-scale, dynamic, online experiments. The visualizer provides an intuitive rendering of complex networks and allows users to customize the appearance of the graph, enabling the development of network experiments in a wide variety of use cases.