  This paper highlights the rationale for the development of BioViz, a tool to
help visualize the existence of collective user interactions in online life
science communities. The first community studied has approximately 22,750
unique users and the second has 35,000. Making sense of the number of
interactions between actors in these networks in order to discern patterns of
collective organization and intelligent behavior is challenging. One of the
complications is that forums - our object of interest - can vary in their
purpose and remit (e.g. the role of gender in the life sciences to forums of
praxis such as one exploring the cell line culturing) and this shapes the
structure of the forum organization itself. Our approach took a random sample
of 53 forums which were manually analyzed by our research team and interactions
between actors were recorded as arcs between nodes. The paper focuses on a
discussion of the utility of our approach, but presents some brief results to
highlight the forms of knowledge that can be gained in identifying collective
group formations. Specifically, we found that by using a matrix-based
visualization approach, we were able to see patterns of collective behavior
which we believe is valuable both to the study of collective intelligence and
the design of virtual organizations.
