Connect The Dots Activity Guide
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What is Connect the Dots?
Connect the Dots shows you how your data is connected
with a visual network diagram. It helps you answer
questions about the interconnectedness of the data
points in your dataset. This hands-on activity helps partici-
pants learn about network data by creating and analyzing a
dataset about their own interests.
Learning Goals
• Understanding that relationships between things can be
a type of data to analyze
• Understanding when something can be analyzed as
network data (such as friendships, web page hyperlinks,
and even favorite restaurants)
• Awareness of some common algorithmic analyses of
network diagrams
• Experience analyzing a network diagram to answer
questions
RUN THE ACTIVITY
Solving a Problem
Networks can be useful for nding certain types of answers
that aren’t apparent in spreadsheet data. Show a picture
of “spaghetti chart” network diagram and ask how many
people know how to read it. Introduce the ideas of nodes
(dots) and edges (connections) on that chart. Explain how
network diagrams capture connections between things, and
Connect the Dots introduces analyzing those connections.
Share Inspirational Examples
Show a few network diagrams that reveal interesting insights. One example is theyrule.net, which
shows connections between board members of Fortune 500 companies; showing how a small group
of powerful people advise the majority of companies.
Total time
30 Minutes
Audience
3 - 100 people. Ages 12+.
We designed this for around 30 people, but
you can run it with more or less.
Space
• a projector connected to a
computer
• ability to break out into small
groups of 3 clustered around a
computer/phone/tablet
Supplies
Computers/phones/tablets (1 for
every 3 people)
Reminders
• The recommendations for
restaurants are of course limit-
ed to the experiences of people
in the room… this isn’t as thor-
ough as Yelp.
• The algorithmic measurements
can give you some insight into
the graph and how to think
about it. Is it very clique-y? Is it
very connected?
Build a Network Graph
Create a dataset of people’s restaurant recommendations.
Use Connect the Dots to analyze it as a network.
DataBasic is a suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that
introduce concepts of working with data. DataBasic is a project of
the Engagement Lab at Emerson College and the MIT Center for
Civic Media. Supported by the Knight Foundation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
Collect the Data
1. Create a public Google Spreadsheet and write the short
url on a blackboard. Add a header row with two col-
umns: “Name” and “Restaurant”
2. Break the room into pairs of people. Ask each pair to
talk about their favorite restaurants in a popular town
or neighborhood close to your workshop location (pick
some place lots of people are likely to have been to)
3. Tell each person to add three rows to the shared
spreadsheet, each including their name in the rst
column and then their favorite restaurant in the next
(one row for each restaurant). Tell them it is ne if the
restaurants are the same as their partner. Ask them to
make sure they spell it right.
4. Open Connect the Dots (https://databasic.io/connect-
thedots) and copy and paste the person-restaurant data
into the “Paste Data” tab. Click on “Graph”.
Introduce the Tool
Show everyone the various parts of the output. The dia-
gram of their data is on the left, showing the connections
from people to restaurants. Introduce the two types of
scores under the chart, which summarize how connect-
ed the dots are in various ways. Introduce the concept of
Betweenness Centrality, showing the top “connectors” in
the group. Explain how this chart can answer questions the
spreadsheet can’t, for instance it can be used to gure out
what restaurant you should try that you’d be likely to enjoy
(based on the restaurants picked by the people you are
most connected to).
Analyze the Results
Break the room into groups of three and have each pick a dataset to analyze; they can choose
the one we just created, or one of the sample sets. Ask them to look for interesting insights into
the data based on the network chart. Give them 10 minutes, and tell them that each group will
have a chance to share-back their top nding at the end. As they share-back focus on these
questions and topics:
• What are the benets and limits of analyzing data as a network? Could their nding have
been discovered in the spreadsheet version of this data?
• How is each algorithm useful or not for making statements about the network and the data it
shows?
Glossary
Community
A group of nodes in a network graph
that have more connections to each
other than to other nodes outside
the community.
Bipartite graph
A network graph with two types of
nodes. For instance, people connect-
ed to restaurants they love but not
to other people.
Betweeness centrality
Scores how much of a “connector”
each node is. A high score means
lots of nodes can go through one to
quickly connect to other nodes.
Degree
The immediate number of connec-
tions a node has.
Edge
A connection between one node and
another node.
Node
The “dots” in the network - the cen-
tral organizing things that is con-
nected to others.
