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How do you balance aesthetics and functionality in your network visualizations?

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Network visualization is a powerful tool for exploring and communicating complex data, especially in the field of social network analysis (SNA). However, creating effective and appealing network graphs is not a trivial task. You need to consider both the aesthetic and functional aspects of your design, as well as the intended audience and purpose of your visualization. In this article, we will discuss some of the key principles and challenges of network visualization, and share some tips and examples to help you balance beauty and utility in your network graphs.

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1 What is network visualization?

Network visualization is a form of data visualization that represents data as a set of nodes (or vertices) and links (or edges) that show the relationships or interactions between them. Nodes can represent entities such as people, organizations, concepts, or events, and links can represent ties such as friendship, collaboration, influence, or similarity. Network visualization can help you discover patterns, clusters, outliers, or anomalies in your data, as well as communicate your findings to others.

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Muhammed Atef

Head of Digital at AlAin News
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Network visualization is a graphical representation of networks, showcasing how entities (nodes) are interconnected (edges). It's crucial in understanding complex relationships within a network. Balancing aesthetics and functionality is key. In my experience, starting with a clear goal for the visualization helps. Simplify where possible, emphasizing clarity and legibility while maintaining an engaging visual appeal. One thing I've found helpful is using color and size to differentiate node types and edge weights, making the network easier to understand at a glance.

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2 Why is network visualization challenging?

Network visualization is challenging because it involves dealing with high-dimensional, non-linear, and often noisy data. Moreover, it requires making trade-offs between different goals and constraints, such as clarity, accuracy, aesthetics, scalability, and interactivity. For example, you may want to show all the details of your network, but also avoid clutter and overlap. Or you may want to highlight the most important nodes and links, but also preserve the overall structure and context of your network. Or you may want to use colors, shapes, and sizes to encode additional information, but also avoid confusion and distraction.

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Elijah Meeks

Data Visualization Expert
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While traditional forms of network visualization focus on representing social networks and structures like social networks, there are important sub-categories that have their own familiar styles of representation and analysis. For instance, transportation network analysis is often laid out geographically and funnel analysis shows flows through a system (a network) typically in a left-to-right or center-outward manner. Even a simple Venn Diagram is a kind of network showing the strength of connection between two groups. Remember when you're planning a network visualization project to explore the domain and understand the existing visual metaphors for networks.

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3 How to balance aesthetics and functionality?

Creating a network visualization that balances aesthetics and functionality is not a one-size-fits-all solution. However, there are some general guidelines and best practices you can follow. Start by defining your goal and audience, as these factors will influence your layout, style, and interaction techniques. Choose an appropriate layout; force-directed, hierarchical, circular, or geographic layouts can emphasize different aspects of your network. When it comes to visual variables, use those that are easy to perceive and understand and that match the type and scale of your data. Finally, test and refine your network visualization by checking if it meets your goal and audience needs and if it follows the principles of good design. Don't forget to ask for feedback from others, especially from your target viewers, so that you can make changes and improvements as needed.

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Elijah Meeks

Data Visualization Expert
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Most examples of network visualization show networks connecting nodes of the same type, like social networks where every node represents a person. But bipartite and tripartite (and even more n-partite) networks are more common than you think. In those cases, make sure to use encodings that clearly distinguish between the different kinds of nodes, such as icons showing a page for articles and icons showing a person for authors in a bipartite network connecting authors to articles. You can reduce the complexity of these networks using multimodal network projection, which collapses one of the node types into a kind of edge, so for our citation network, it would connect two authors via articles that they were co-authors on.

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How do you balance aesthetics and functionality in your network visualizations?

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1 What is network visualization?

2 Why is network visualization challenging?

3 How to balance aesthetics and functionality?

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