I have just finished some data analysis looking at the development of biosafety capacity-development projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Capacity-development in this issue involves a large number of different organisations who all work with each other in different ways in different projects. I want to create a network of these collaborations but i don't want to have to sit there with pen and paper drawing out all the linkages so does anyone know of any software that i can use to do this?

thanks

do you mean like a flow chart or spider map? Depends how big and complex it is but you can
produce those sorts of charts through word.

If you don't have MS visio, MS powerpoint is pretty good.

Yes its a sort of web network that i want to create but word would not be able to handle it as there are 63 projects each with numerous lead and collaborating institutions and i know you can get network generating software that you just put the data in and it creates the network but have no idea what it is called or where to look for it.

S.

OK gotcha. You might have the same problems in pp as you would in word, with the size of the thing if you have over 60 imputs. Look for something called Edraw -you might even be able to download it for free, but if not it is quite cheap - about £20.

thanks just looked that up by i think its still more flow charts than social network analysis - my house mate has just suggested inflow or netminer not sure whether anyone has heard of those?

You could try Freemind or The Brain (mindmapping software). Freemind is open source and free but more limited. The brain is pretty cool and relatively inexpensive for a personal edition (although a networked web edition is very expensive).

http://www.thebrain.com/
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Some discussion on Visual Mapping here:

http://elgg.net/mcwacky/weblog

Another thought, the Brain allows you to attach all kinds of documents as well as hyperlinks to web pages, etc. The one disadvantage is that as it grows, the deeper links/nodes are harder to track. Anyway, not sure if these are what you were looking for.

OniGraffle [especially if you're a Mac user]. Can be easily found and downloaded at many torrent sites.

That shoild rea OMNIGRAFFLE

Thanks very much i shall look into those at least it looks like it is possible to do the thought of having to do it by hand with coloured pens and bits of paper to start with scared me. The data collection / entry / analysis has been slow enough, interesting but slow. Only 18 months to go!