An artistic data visualization of the connections between students in Eliot House at Harvard University.
Eliot House, one of Harvard's twelve residential houses for undergraduates, holds a special place for all who know it. From the friendly, familiar faces of Eliot House staff to the students who crowd the bustling dining hall every evening, Eliot is a welcoming home for hundreds of individuals. As an Eliot resident for the past three years, I have formed some of my most cherished college relationships through Eliot, and I will always be grateful for Eliot’s tight-knit community.
As someone interested in using data visualization to draw out patterns at scale, I was curious to see whether I could visualize and portray the essence of the Eliot house community: the people and the connections between them. I collected data from students in the house and created a network graph visualization (with 38 nodes and 655 links!), representing students as nodes and connections fostered by Eliot as edge links.
The final visualization piece (later installed in the Eliot Junior Common Room as an art piece!):
In my piece, I sought to capture the diversity of student backgrounds, the gathering of people with different interests, and the plethora of connections that Eliot House has fostered. I hope to leave the viewer with a colorful impression of Eliot’s vibrant community, because at the end of the day, what makes Eliot so special are its characters and connections.
Some of the main questions I considered when making the visualization were:
- How can I capture the diversity of student backgrounds and intellectual interests?
- What is the best way to visualize connections between people?
- How can I encode and represent individual information (e.g. hometown, concentration, class year) while maintaining data privacy and anonymity?
This project was completed as part of the Eliot Community Artist Fellowship. Many thanks to all the Eliot students who participated in the data collection survery and to Anne Lheem, Stephanie Paulsell, and Andi Wright for their support. If you have any thoughts or questions on this work, I'd love to hear from you.
Read more about this project and how it was made here.