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Network Visualization
Network visualization is a subdiscipline of network analysis whose goal is to display the units of study (nodes) and the connections between them (edges). Network data are very common in the social and health sciences; examples include social networks comprising people and their relationships and comorbidity networks describing co-occurrences of conditions in a population. Network visualization is a crucial part of network analysis that allows the researcher to see the complex structure inherent to network data. This entry discusses the different types of network visualizations, their individual advantages and disadvantages, and some commonly used tools available for creating network visualizations.
Node-Link Diagrams
Node-link diagrams are the most common way to visualize network data. The study and formation of node-link diagrams forms a subfield of mathematics and computer science known as graph drawing.
Figure 1 A Simple Example of a Node-Link Diagram for a Social Network of 10 Individuals, Where Nodes in the Network Are Represented With Circles and Relationships Between the Nodes Are Lines
Source: Wikimedia Commons (2006): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social-network.png (public domain).
Definition
In a node-link diagram like the example shown in Figure 1, there are two visual objects: points and lines. The points represent the nodes, also called vertices, in the network. The nodes in a network are the individual units of study. The lines in a node-link diagram represent the edges, also called ties or links, which represent relationships or other connections between the nodes. If there is an edge between two nodes in a network, it is represented by a line connecting the two points. For directed networks, where the edge is defined as coming out of one node and into another, the edges have arrows on them to indicate the direction of the tie.
Node-link diagrams are typically drawn in two dimensions, though some software tools for network visualization will show the network in three dimensions. With the exception of spatial networks, in which the nodes have meaningful physical locations, the locations of points in a node-link diagram do not convey any meaning about the underlying network data.
A node in Figure 1 is represented by a circle, which is usually the default shape for a node in a node-link diagram. The nodes can be any shape, and often, text representing the node label is used instead of a geometric shape. In addition, the visual properties of the points and lines, such as size, shape, and color, can vary according to underlying node and edge information. In a social network, for example, the size of a point could represent a person’s age and the shape or color can vary according to the person’s gender. The lines can also show edge information: for example, solid lines for family members and dotted lines for friends in a social network.
To construct a node-link diagram, the points are placed in 2D space according to one of several methods, then the edges are drawn as lines connecting the points.
Node Placement
There are many different methods to place the points in 2D space. Because the positions of the points typically have no meaning, the method of node placement is an important choice to make when constructing a node-link diagram.
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