Layout › Social Media Research Foundation

NodeXL: Automatically Collapse Groups in v.166 with Autofill Columns and Conditional Collapse

NodeXL allows users to gather vertices into named collections called “Groups”. This is handy whenever the entities in the network are made up of different types or an algorithm has divided the network into sub-regions based on how densely some vertices connect to one another. The Groups menu is found in the NodeXL>Analysis menu: Since version […]

Group-in-a-box – a new layout option in NodeXL (v.164)

Attractive and well designed network visualization layouts are complex to automate. Many researchers have devoted a great deal of effort to refining algorithms that assign the best set of positions to a set of nodes. In many cases a layout algorithm will work well for some types of graphs and not others. NodeXL has a [...]

Ordering smaller components in a graph – a NodeXL feature tip

From this:to this: in just a few clicks. Many network graphs contain disconnected smaller graphs, called "components", within them. Most layout algorithms do a poor job of managing to group each component in a separate space. Instead, often, components are…

Component Binning: a network layout improvement in NodeXL v.108

Network visualizations can be very compelling but they are often a smear of unintelligible nodes and edges without refinement and filtering. Creating an automated layout for a complex graph is a challenging area of mathematics and computer science. Several layouts…

Network layout game: minimize edge crossings

Jordi Comas at Bucknell University just mentioned this cool application on the SOCNET social network analysis discussion email list and I think it is worth a repeat: here is a great game that challenges you to find arrangements of nodes…