I’m utterly amazed by my grandfather’s social network and connections by the numbers.
The enclosed data visualization dashboard uses a contemporary analytic tool like Microsoft PowerBI, which can be useful to help analyze data gathered about Zalman’s contacts to gain insight into his influential social network. Using new digital techniques to unravel foundational questions about Zalman Unreich On is an ongoing effort. The Visualization of this data allows us to better and more immediately grasp his “espionage” network at a high level.
So far and still growing, we’ve identified over eighty very prominent contacts directly affiliated with Zalman over his lifetime. It’s a good mix of so-called “movers and shakers” based on an array of high-powered politicians, Mossad agents, famous athletes and more from across the world.
The following diagram representing his interactions. Given my IT background & increasing interest in digital approaches to tell another story, I started to create of a project that would visualize and analyze the network of important people he was affiliated with. I decided to begin by mapping a single interaction from historical records and our collection. What was most important to me, was focusing on the network as a whole rather than individual themselves. At a later stage, it will be important to focus back on these individuals and their connection to each other. Network mapping can highlight people who play unusual roles during this period in Israel’s history, for example, I tried to identify more dominant people who are cited far more frequently than others in https://www.worldcat.org.
I hope this tool engages the community and provides users with a different bird’s eye view of my grandfather, based on my investigation of his life story.
Data Source
Contact names were gathered and identified from Zalman’s archive collection. Images and other details were collected from Wikipedia pages. The “interesting” characteristics, such as a person’s popularity in the library catalog and associated attributes, when using the “Word Cloud” text pattern analysis, was collected about the person identified in the WorldCat online catalog. WorldCat is a public catalog that itemizes the collections in over 17,000 libraries in 123 countries and territories that participate in the OCLC global cooperative.
The database itself can be explored here. We welcome all comments or questions.
Copyright and Citation
Everything in this site falls under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The project can be cited as:
David M. Baron “Zalman Unreich On Network Project.”