Capturing team dynamics through temporal social surfaces

This paper introduces temporal social surfaces. Temporal social surfaces show the dynamic evolution of social relationships in groups. Changes in measures of social network analysis such as betweenness centrality are plotted as a curve for each actor. The curves for all actors are combined in a single picture. Smoothing the resulting surface leads to a single-picture overview of social dynamics of a group. Temporal social surfaces are computed using two variants of a "sliding time window" algorithm with TeCFlow (temporal communication flow visualizer). TeCFlow is a system for creating movies of temporal information such as e-mail archives, Web logs, and Web search results. TeCFlow takes as input time series of records, and generates an interactive movie of the changes in the resulting directed graph.