Ever wonder what New York high society is often up to? Wonder no more for New York Social Diary (NYSD) has painstakingly documented every detail of all the Who’s who of New York since 2007, completed with pictures of course. What’s totally cool is that every picture on the site is captioned with the names of the people appeared in that picture, so we know who often hangs out with whom, who is the most popular New Yorker (ie. appears the most in these pictures) etc. Time to do a small network analysis to see what’s going on in the inner circle of New York elites.
I scraped 32 pages and got about 72809 pictures with captions. After this I parsed each picture caption to get names of the people in the pictures. There are about 83562 unique names in the end.
Using networkx, I added the unique names to be the node of the graph. Pairs of people who appear together in a picture represent a link between two nodes. The more two people apppear together, the higher weight their link is.
Here’s the Circos plot of the 50 most popular people on NYSD and how they’re linked together. The minimum appearance here is 88 times and the maximum is 303. Because I’m not cool, I only recognize a few names like Michael Bloomberg, Alec Baldwin and Martha Stewart.
The width of the links tells you if two people appear multiple times together. So while some people are truly social butterflies (e.g. Alexandra Lebenthal), some just have besties that they hang out with all the time (eg. Sharon Bush who appeared 15 times with Jean Shafiroff).