Social Network Visualization Eyecandy

Visualization of graph data is incredibly challenging, particularly when it comes to extremely large, scale-free graphs and social networks. A few simple searches on the Web and you will find some mesmerizing and very cool images. Perhaps the most cited and fascinating of these are Matt's "Mapping the Blogosphere" series.

Some of my favorite tools for graph visualization are LGL (see Twitter visualization using LGL), Prefuse, Guess and UCINet (no specific ranked order). I have also been waiting to get a chance to try out AT&T's large network visualization software. Two other promising tools that I have not played with yet are Tulip (TOTH Eytan!) and yWorks.  Following is an image I had generated a year ago (more here) using UCINet. This is a community of political blogs discovered using an implementation of Dr. Mark Newman's community detection algorithm:

One thing that I think would be exciting is visualizing evolving networks. Current tools force you to map blogs, social networks etc. into static graphs. This is a serious limitation. Their real meaning and value comes from seeing the temporal interactions between members, evolution of community structures,  changes in strength of ties over a period and detecting bursts. As far as my knowledge goes, this feature is not supported by any of the open source/freely available tools that I have explored. I would love to hear about other graph visualization tools that I may be unaware of.

Comments

[Rajiv]

you should try cytoscape. much better for large no of nodes

[Akshay Java]

Wow.. screenshots from cytoscape look beautiful. Thanks for the lead Rajiv!

[Stan]

Hi

Interesting point you're making. I guess it's not too difficult to take a snapshot of a well-defined network at a specific date, repeat on a regular basis and, just like a flip-book, look at changes and evolution over time. Food for thought indeed. In the same vein, Techpresident recently posted an article about the propagation dynamics of the Paris Hilton-McCain videos (http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/30495/tracking_a_political_meme_mccain_vs_paris_hilton).

The network graph remains a static canvas, but the visualization of information propagation over this canvas is pretty neat.

-Stan
ps: the link to the research paper you mention in your post appears to be broken

[Guilhem Fouetillou]

Hi, you should look at a french open source project named gephi, it's a graph exploration software with a great potential. Here is the link to the project website : http://gephi.org/.

[Sean McDonald]

Our software is not free / open source, but it is interactive as you have described: http://jutenetworks.com/jute-nrm-prototype/