  Numerous propagation models describing social influence in social networks
can be found in the literature. This makes the choice of an appropriate model
in a given situation difficult. Selecting the most relevant model requires the
ability to objectively compare them. This comparison can only be made at the
cost of describing models based on a common formalism and yet independent from
them. We propose to use graph rewriting to formally describe propagation
mechanisms as local transformation rules applied according to a strategy. This
approach makes sense when it is supported by a visual analytics framework
dedicated to graph rewriting. The paper first presents our methodology to
describe some propagation models as a graph rewriting problem. Then, we
illustrate how our visual analytics framework allows to interactively
manipulate models, and underline their differences based on measures computed
on simulation traces.
