Visual Analysis of Contact Patterns in School Environments

Information Visualisation strategies can be applied in a variety of domains. In the context of temporal networks, i.e., networks in which interactions between individuals occur throughout time, efforts have been conducted to develop visual approaches that allow finding interaction patterns, anomalies, and other behaviours not previously perceived in the data. This paper presents two case studies involving real-world education networks from a primary school and a high school. For this purpose, we used the Massive Sequence View (MSV) layout with the Community-based Node Ordering (CNO) method, two well established approaches for visual analysis of temporal networks. Our results show that the identified patterns involving students/students and students/teachers represent important information to benefit and support decision making about school management and teaching strategies, especially those related to strategic group formation.