Imagine a middle school with the usual assortment of bullies and bullied, popular and lonely, violent and passive, and troubled.
I try to keep up on who's doing well and who is not. My data consists of student choosing to work together or not as reported by the students as they write their names at the top of an assignment they work on cooperatively (or solo) in small groups of their own choosing.
I'd like to be able to enter the data in a spreadsheet, one line per paper. I could export the data to pretty much any text format, and import it into a program that would create a graph consisting of each student connected to every student she chose to work with. I'd like to be able to add subsequent data from future assignments, and see the web of social connections with the goal of seeing which student don't seem to be strongly connected to anyone.
I can do this by hand, but with five groups of 30-plus students across several weeks, automating the task is really the only way.
I run Linux on every computer I own, though I do have access to a MacBook.
I use Python and the NetworkX package: https://networkx.github.io/
Granted, there's some learning to be done in using it, but it's very straight forward and richly featured. And of course using Python makes the automation part simple too.
Take a look. I've used it in a board game setting (machine learning) and finance.
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