Network data is increasingly pervasive, but can be hard to work with. The naive first pass at a network diagram usually looks like a “hairball.” If you add some simple network measures like degree, betweenness, centrality, and community membership, you’ll be able to create more comprehensibe network representations. Along with the ubiqitous force layout, I’ll cover alternative layout options and interaction techniques to improve end-user experience of your network visuals. Examples shown will be primarily from Gephi and D3.js.

Lynn Cherny is a local data analysis and visualization consultant who works in Python, R, and D3.js. She has a Ph.D. from Stanford in linguistics and spent 18 years as a UX designer and manager before going back to the code side.