Updates

Architect, Interviewer, and Fresco now speak more than one language! Language support has been one of our most requested features, and you can now use the apps in English, British English, or Spanish, including the interview your participants see. Just pick your language from the globe icon in each app, or from the settings menu during an interview. More languages are coming soon.

What's translated?

Everything in the app interfaces: buttons, guidance, dialogs, and messages, including what a participant sees during an interview. Your protocol content (questions, prompts, labels, and response options) appears exactly as you wrote it, and your collected data isn't affected. Translating protocol content is coming in a future release.

By default, each app follows your browser's language. Architect and Interviewer remember your choice on each device, and Fresco saves it to your account.

More languages coming soon

We're working on adding more languages. These first translations are machine-led, so some phrasing may read awkwardly. If you spot something, or would like to help bring a new language to Network Canvas, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at info@networkcanvas.com or post on the user community. We may be able to offer limited compensation for help with a new language.

Thank you for all your feedback. It helps shape what we build next!

Architect and Interviewer have been rebuilt as websites you can open on any device, or install as apps, and Interviewer runs on iPads and Android tablets again. Together with Fresco 4.0.0, they share one foundation and a new protocol format, Schema 8, which brings a range of new features:

• Six new interview interfaces, including geospatial maps, family pedigrees, and a free-form network composer.
• Protocol improvements, including richer validation, enhanced skip logic, and configurable node shapes.
• Fresco 4.0.0, with team accounts, a secure data API, and full self-hosting.
• Automatic updates and improved security, including encrypted data storage in Interviewer.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded Joshua Melville, Network Canvas's lead developer, an NIH Research Specialist award (R50) for research software engineers. It funds two years of work, from July 2026 to June 2028, to keep Network Canvas maintainable, secure and sustainable as open-science software.

The award builds on almost a decade of NIH funding for Network Canvas, which is now used in at least 55 NIH-funded studies, from opioid use disorder to social influences on microbial communities. Over the two years, Joshua will move the code to TypeScript and resolve key technical debt, enhance Architect, support offline interviewing with the web-based interview app, and grow the community around the software with new training resources. Read the project details on NIH RePORTER.

A curated collection of published Network Canvas protocols that you can explore, download and adapt for your own studies. Browse the gallery.

Fresco can now be deployed to Netlify. Some configuration settings have new names, so existing deployments need a small update. Read the release notes.

Northwestern University's Institute for Public Health and Medicine explains how social networks shape health, and how researchers use Network Canvas to map them. Read the article.

The International Network for Social Network Analysis gave its 2025 William D. Richards, Jr. Software Award to the Network Canvas team for developing a free, open-source tool for social network data collection. Read about the award.

A new settings system, and a simpler set-up for file storage. Existing deployments need a small configuration change. Read the release notes.

The first stable release of Fresco. Host it on your own server, upload protocols you designed in Architect, and let participants complete Network Canvas interviews in their web browser. Read the release notes.

Ready for research

Fresco opened as a public beta in March 2024. After testing by the community, version 1.0 removes the beta label: Fresco is ready for collecting research data.

Interviews in the browser

Fresco gives participants the same look, feel and interfaces as Interviewer, and exports data in the same formats. Participants can join a study through a link, so interviews can take place remotely, and Fresco includes basic participant management and recruitment. It works with any protocol made in Architect.

Try it first

The documentation includes a sandbox for exploring Fresco without deploying it, and step-by-step instructions for deploying your own copy. Read the Fresco documentation.

A five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse funds Network Canvas Studio, a cloud platform for collecting social network data remotely and at scale, while keeping the ease of use of the existing tools. Read the announcement.

What Studio will add

Studio is planned to include everything in the desktop and tablet apps, plus:

• interviews in the web browser on any device, for remote self-administration or alongside a researcher
• designing, sharing and editing protocols together as a team
• longitudinal studies that carry data forward from earlier interviews
• an open API for real-time links to analysis software
• role-based access for large project teams
• tools for scheduling surveys and sampling participants
• accessibility improvements, including language localization

Shaped by the community

The plans grew out of five years of feedback from researchers using Network Canvas, and the team will run surveys and focus groups with the community as the work progresses. See the grant on NIH RePORTER.

Social influence and contact networks are central to understanding health behaviour and how disease spreads, yet most survey software is not built to capture them. This paper introduces Network Canvas to epidemiologists as an end-to-end workflow for designing and conducting network interviews.

It describes the three applications, Architect, Interviewer and Server, which run on Windows, macOS and Linux, with Interviewer also on Android and iOS, and how their point-and-click design reduces the technical knowledge needed to collect network data. Network Canvas is open source and free under the GNU General Public License 3. Read the paper.

Ask questions, share what you have built and follow announcements on the Network Canvas community forum.

An NIH supplement funds a 12-month pilot to bring Interviewer to the web browser, so participants can complete interviews remotely without installing an app. Read the announcement.

Why the browser

COVID-19 moved public health Partner Services interviews onto the phone, and health departments needed a way to collect network data without meeting in person. Running Interviewer in the browser makes remote self-administration possible, and lets interviews take place where installing an app is not an option, such as on participants' own devices.

What the pilot will change

Interviewer was designed for interviews alongside a trained researcher. To support participants working on their own, the project adds clearer guidance, stricter navigation and checks at each stage to protect data quality, and onboarding steps that can require a valid participant ID and show the agreements an ethics board requires.

Your data, your server

Researchers stay in control of their data. The app runs on your own server or cloud account, and the Network Canvas team never collects or stores interview data. Like the rest of Network Canvas, it is developed in the open and free to use. See the supplement on NIH RePORTER.

Architect 6.3 and Interviewer 6.2 bring automatic sociogram layout, a unified roster interface and stage search in Architect. With this release the desktop apps move into maintenance mode as the team turns to new projects. Read the project update.

Self-reported network studies are often complex and burdensome, both during the interview and when managing the data afterwards. In this paper in Social Networks, the team describes the decisions behind the Network Canvas suite: Architect for designing interview protocols, Interviewer for administering them on touchscreens, and Server for managing deployment and exporting data.

Together, the tools give researchers with little technical expertise a complete workflow, from building their own network interviews to collecting the data in a secure central place. The paper explains the theoretical, philosophical and practical reasons for the key design choices, the experiences that guided them, and their strengths and limitations. Read the paper.

After four years of development and testing, Interviewer, Architect and Server are released as stable, free and open-source software for designing, conducting and managing social network interviews. Read the announcement.

From beta to stable

Network Canvas had been open to the public as a beta since June 2019. Beta testers' bug reports, feedback and feature requests shaped the tools, and early-access researchers were already using them to study contact tracing, sex and drug use, cohesion in deprived communities, and classroom dynamics.

Three apps, one workflow

Architect gives researchers a visual way to design network interviews. Interviewer gives participants a friendly touchscreen interface. Server gathers interviews from every device in one place, so the data stays on the research team's own computers. Architect and Server run on Windows, macOS and Linux, and Interviewer also runs on iPads and Android tablets.

Open to everyone

The suite is free and open source, so anyone can see how it works, adapt it for their own studies, and contribute improvements back. Read the release notes.

A new grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse funds adapting Network Canvas for health departments' Partner Services, which reach the partners of people diagnosed with HIV and other infections. See the grant on NIH RePORTER.

When people are interviewed about their networks more than once, many of the people they name drop out and reappear between interviews. This paper asks whether that change reflects real churn in people's lives, or the interview itself: respondents anchoring on what a network should look like, or naming fewer people to shorten the interview.

Using three waves of a Chicago panel study of young men who have sex with men, collected with Network Canvas's touchscreen sociogram, the authors found little change in average network size across waves. Small but significant changes appeared between the first and second waves, mostly among people with the largest networks, and almost none between the second and third in network size, composition or density. Read the paper.

The first public beta of Interviewer, Architect and Server, ready for researchers to try in their own studies. Read the release notes.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse awards more than $3 million to build Network Canvas into a complete, free suite of tools for network data collection, in a collaboration between Northwestern University and the Oxford Internet Institute. See the grant on NIH RePORTER.

Three tools, one workflow

The five-year grant set out to turn the touchscreen prototype from Joshua Melville's doctoral research and Northwestern's RADAR study into a complete suite: Architect, for designing network interviews without writing code; Interviewer, for conducting them on a touchscreen; and Server, for gathering and managing the data in one place.

A collaboration across the Atlantic

Michelle Birkett and Gregory Phillips II led the project at Northwestern University with Patrick Janulis and Noshir Contractor, working with Bernie Hogan and Joshua Melville at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Built with researchers

The team announced the award, and launched the first networkcanvas.com, in October 2016, with a plan to share early versions with researchers and shape the tools around their feedback. Read Oxford's announcement.

Key network measures for high-risk, hard-to-reach groups still have to be collected by asking people directly, and doing that on paper is slow and burdensome. This paper describes netCanvas, the first version of Network Canvas, which turns the paper participant-aided sociogram into a touchscreen tool. It simplifies data entry, needs less interviewer intervention and set-up, makes data easier to reuse, and shows the network as it is drawn.

The team tested it in a health behavior study with a high-risk, hard-to-reach population, comparing paper and touchscreen with the same participants, and concluded that touchscreen network capture is now a viable alternative, even for highly sensitive data. Read the paper.

Joshua Melville starts building Network Canvas at the Oxford Internet Institute as part of his doctoral research on social support networks, turning the paper participant-aided sociogram into a touchscreen interview.