Chapter 3. An introduction to Gephi and KeyLines
This chapter covers
- A comparison of two graph visualization tools
- A short tutorial on Gephi
- Building visualization web applications with KeyLines
- A short tutorial on KeyLines
You have many different tools available to build graph visualizations, and selecting the right one depends on a number of different factors. Because the tools vary significantly in both their capabilities and their user interface, I selected two that I use in the examples in the rest of the book, Gephi and KeyLines. In the appendix, I discuss their capabilities and show a number of different examples using another graph visualization tool, D3. D3.js is a popular visualization library, but it’s not the focus of this book for two reasons: First, it’s a general-purpose visualization tool that covers many different types of visualizations, and graphs are only a small subset. In addition, D3 is a low-level library, which means that some of the concepts discussed in the later chapters of this book would require pages and pages of source code. For a more in-depth discussion of D3, see the book D3.js in Action by Elijah Meeks (Manning, 2015).