This project examines the political scandals in Grand Rapids, Michigan during the Progressive era. The goal of this project was to look at how Grand Rapids’ elite were connected, in order to show the corruption that occurred because of the connectedness of the elites.
Although this site has several different graphs that examine different connections, I chose to look further into the network of the Grand Rapids elite, which looks at the members of Grand Rapids’ women’s clubs and social welfare organizations. This network involves people/organizations as the nodes, with the edges as affiliations, which makes sense because the desired outcome is to see the relationships between the elite. Many of the central nodes are organizations (e.g. Social Welfare Association), and these organizations connect to all of their members.
The site allows for the user to click on a node to not only see the caption/label for it, but also to view all the members if it is an organization. This allows the user to dig much deeper into who the elite are, and all of the organizations that they are associated with. The user can also just hover the mouse over any node, and the website will dim all other nodes except the ones that have connections to. This allows for a very easy way to see all the connections/affiliations if you are looking for a specific person or group.
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This project looks really cool! It seems like this is kind of a way of representing the social networks that now we are able to represent through social media. I think it would be really interesting to recreate this now with social organizations in a city, and then to compare that with social networks and see if there are vast differences.