Week Four Reflection
This week I focused on learning the data visualization software Gephi to try and approximate the prototype I had constructed during week two. The software, which was initially released in 2008, was unfamiliar to me before starting this project and I was interested in gaining a very technical understanding of the platform. While I have worked with more contemporary software like Tableau, I felt like these experiences kept me from truly understanding the principles behind data visualization software due to their more prefabricated interface designs.
The glut of new, often subscription based, data visualization software isn't designed for people working in computational linguistics or information science, it's tailored for business people to create dynamic and visually stimulating material quickly and easily. In contrast, Gephi is open source, aesthetically bare and only gives as much as you put in. While this is initially intimidating and necessarily involves a larger time investment, I feel that this has given me a better grasp of the granular elements that are at play in all data visualization software.
In order to gain a more global perspective with Gephi, I read Ken Cherven's 2015 book Mastering Gephi Network Visualizations. This resource was a very helpful guide through some of the confusing elements involved in the software. Among them, the overview>data laboratory>preview layout arrangement, wherein the data laboratory looks like excel but doesn't function like it, overview requires the same action to be performed many times by the user and doesn't communicate with the preview tab, which essentially acts like an independently functioning export window. The book was also helpful in understanding the appearance functionalities of the software, which is manipulated by downloading separate plug-ins from the Gephi site. Oh, and if this was all not intimidating enough for novice users, did I mention that there is no undo function?
One very important step that the book doesn't discuss is the import function. The data needs to be prepared in comma separated values format and requires specific headings for each column which are distinct depending on whether you are importing information for the nodes or the edges of the visualization or a static or dynamic graph. The import process is extremely important, as the ability to manipulate raw data within the software is very limited. I feel this is representative of the software's origin's in more science based fields, where the focus is on the ability to import upwards of a thousand nodes, in contrast to this project, where the numbers range between 300 nodes for the Overhead View and 60 nodes for the Field View. While this means that Gephi may not be the best choice for the prototype, I still feel that this was an excellent learning experience that will lend itself to future work with other platforms.
Insights on the process can be read here.
Reading:
Cherven, Ken. Mastering Gephi Network Visualization: Produce Advanced Network Graphs in Gephi and Gain Valuable Insights into Your Network Datasets. Packt Publishing, 2015.
CSV Format. https://gephi.org/users/supported-graph-formats/csv-format/. Accessed 17 July 2021.
GEXF File Format. https://gephi.org/gexf/format/. Accessed 17 July 2021.
How to Get Gephi Output to Be Interactive like Linkedin’s InMap - Quora. https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-Gephi-output-to-be-interactive-like-Linkedins-InMap. Accessed 13 July 2021.
“How to Make One Source Have Multiple Targets? · Issue #2107 · Gephi/Gephi.” GitHub, https://github.com/gephi/gephi/issues/2107. Accessed 18 July 2021.
Levallois, Clément. Simple Gephi Project from A to Z. p. 25.
Converting a Network with Dates into a Dynamic Network. https://seinecle.github.io/gephi-tutorials/generated-html/converting-a-network-with-dates-into-dynamic.html. Accessed 17 July 2021.
Post-Dispatch, DANIEL NEMAN St Louis. “Man Who Changed What We Eat.” NNY360, https://www.nny360.com/artsandlife/man-who-changed-what-we-eat/article_c9ab8711-230e-59c7-a3c9-b86f475c2861.html. Accessed 21 July 2021.
Regular-Expressions.Info - Regex Tutorial, Examples and Reference - Regexp Patterns. https://www.regular-expressions.info/. Accessed 17 July 2021.
Sigma Js. http://sigmajs.org/. Accessed 20 July 2021.
Supported Graph Formats. https://gephi.org/users/supported-graph-formats/. Accessed 18 July 2021.
Tseng, Hsing. Tableau Competitors | Top Alternatives to Tableau In 2021. 16 June 2021, https://www.selecthub.com/business-intelligence/tableau-competitors/.