Our second set of online talks, on the theme of Network Visualisations, took place on 19th October 2020.
Talk 1: “MiRANA: Visualising networks in genetic epidemiology”, Chris Moreno-Stokoe
MiRANA is an upcoming visualisation tool which is intended to help genetic epidemiologists explore and evaluate network effects in their data. MiRANA arranges estimates for the effects of traits on eachother (e.g., the effect of BMI on diabetes) to produce a public health network. Aimed for use in Mendelian Randomisation research, Chris Moreno-Stokoe demonstrated the ease of use of this tool and showed output visualisations of network effect (including use in a data exploration game). Chris is a third year PhD candidate studying genetic epidemiology and interactive data visualisation. MiRANA is in development for an official launch next year.
Chris provided the following links for people to use the tool with an example dataset:
Chris’s slides can be downloaded here.
Talk 2: “A visualisation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s steamship social network”, Gareth Jones
The construction of the three great steamships, starting with the SS Great Western, involved many hundreds of people. In this project we built a visual social network using a d3 force graph to investigate the relationships between the key individuals involved in the construction of each ship. Working with Dr James Boyd at the Brunel Institute, the network was constructed based on the analysis of hundreds of letters of correspondence between Brunel and the engineers, architects and investors involved in each project. The network is still under development and is available at https://brunels-network.github.io/network/.
The simple simple force graph simulation example Gareth created using the d3 force library can be found here: https://github.com/gareth-j/d3-react-example
Research Software Engineering run a mailbox for queries – ask-rse@bristol.ac.uk – code design, testing and performance questions.
Gareth’s slides can be downloaded here.