Christina's LIS Rant

When doing bibliometrics, or social network analysis or any kind of network graph, there are only so many different ways to convey information.

• Size of nodes
• Shape of nodes (including pictures)
• Color of nodes
• Border of nodes (or multiple borders)
• Labels (node or edge)
• Edge weight
• Edge color
• Arrows
• Shading areas around/behind nodes
• Layout or arrangement of nodes

Of these, I almost always size nodes by degree (connections to other nodes), do thickness of lines by their weight, and do some sort of energy or spring layout.

If I do some sort of clustering or community detection or even want to call out components, I’ll do that with node color.

My normal things are easy in any package that will graph networks. I was working on a project where we were looking at the maturity of a particular part of an industry. As part of these, we wanted to know if the necessary component systems were available from multiple suppliers and if those suppliers had relationships with different system integrators and if their things were operational or were just for lab or testing purposes.

We could have done a graph for each sub system but they wanted this graph to really just be one slide in a fairly small deck. I tried various approaches in Gephi and NetDraw and wasn’t excited. So back to R and iGraph.  In the end (anonymized) :

I used:

• node shape for if a component or a system integrator
• color for type of component
• size for degree
• line dashed or dotted for if it was in operation or not

I really wanted to show different shapes for each category but igraph only has like 6 default ones and they don’t look all that different from each other. NetDraw has more. I tried to use raster images – but I’m on a windows machine and I found all that very confusing.

One unfortunate thing about this graph is that I had to list companies multiple times if they had offerings in multiple categories.

Customer seemed to like it.

I’m not going to take the time to anonymize all the code but here are some key pieces – ask if there’s anything I figured out that you don’t immediately see how to do.
I started with a spreadsheet (3 of us librarians were adding data)
nodetable tab:
id label category

edgetable tab:
source target yes/no notes

These I imported into gephi (super easy)… and then tried all sorts of stuff… and then exported into graphml
#read in the graph
g<-read.graph("g.graphml", format="graphml")

#shape nodes. these work, but you can't have n/a. so there has to be a default. also, there is an easier way
for (i in 1:101)ifelse(V(g)[i]$Category=='category', V(g)[i]$shape<-'circle', V(g)[i]$shape<-'square')

#color of nodes - a simple number will draw from the palette. see below
for (i in 1:101)if(V(g)[i]$Category=="category"){V(g)[i]$color<-1}

#calculate and keep the degree. i use it again for label placement (not shown) and to bold some labels (not shown)
V(g)$degree<-degree(g, mode="all")

#when I tested the graphing, the isolates were all mixed in and messed up all the labels.
#subgraph to show isolates separately
gi<-induced.subgraph(g,V(g)$degree==0)
gnoni<-induced.subgraph(g,V(g)$degree!=0)

#make dotted lines for not operational
for (i in 1:76) ifelse (E(gnoni)[i]$"operational"=="yes", E(gnoni)[i]$edge.lty<-1,E(gnoni)[i]$edge.lty<-2)

#prettier colors
library("RColorBrewer", lib.loc="~/R/win-library/3.1")
mypalette<-brewer.pal(6,"Paired")
palette(mypalette)

#legend definitions
colors <- c('gray40', 1,2,3,4,5,6) labels <- vector of categories


#plot graph keep device open
plot.igraph(gnoni, layout=layout.fruchterman.reingold, edge.arrow.size=0.1, edge.color="black", vertex.size=V(gnoni)$degree, vertex.label.dist=V(gnoni)$vertex.label.dist, vertex.label.color="black", vertex.label.family="sans",edge.curved=TRUE, vertex.label.cex=0.8, edge.lty=E(gnoni)$edge.lty)

#put legends on - isolates are just shown as a legend so they are neatly lined up
#could have been done by plotting points

legend("bottomright",legend=labels, fill=colors, border="black", cex=0.7, inset=c(-0.1,0))
legend("topleft", legend=V(gi)$label, pch=19, col=V(gi)$color, cex=0.7, bty="n", y.intersp=0.5)
legend("topright", legend=c("Yes", "No"), lty=c(1,2), cex=0.7,inset=c(-0.02,0))