Gephi Cookbook is a guide to learn about interactive network exploration and visualization accompanied by the graph theory concepts that drive them. It helps you to understand about the nuances of network visualization, not only from a conceptual, but also from an implementation perspective. This book is an invaluable resource if you are looking forward to getting a deep-dive into the network analysis domain without having to learn how to code.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Gephi, will take you through the process of installing Gephi on various platforms. It also gives you an overview of Gephi's GUI and basic understanding of various modes available in it.
Chapter 2, Basic Graph Manipulations, teaches you to perform basic graph manipulations such as adding and deleting nodes, editing node attributes, and applying filters on networks by exploiting the user friendly interface of Gephi.
Chapter 3, Using Graph Layout Algorithms, explores the basic default layout algorithms available in Gephi from both a conceptual as well as an implementation perspective.
Chapter 4, Working with Partition and Ranking Algorithms, will take you through the processes of the ranking and partitioning of graphs based on user-defined metrics and modifying the graph visualization based on various parameters.
Chapter 5, Running Metrics, Filters, and Timelines, will enable you to learn about the statistical properties of graphical networks and how they can exploit these properties with the help of Gephi.
Chapter 6, Working in the Data Laboratory Mode, thoroughly describes the Data Laboratory mode in Gephi, and explores a number of tasks that can be accomplished with the help of this mode.
Chapter 7, Getting Graphs and Networks Ready for Preview, covers the in-built rendering settings of Gephi and the process of exporting the final graph to multiple formats.
Chapter 8, Exploring Dynamic and Multilevel Graphs, focuses on two special kinds of graphs, dynamic graphs and multilevel graphs, and describes their working in detail.
Chapter 9, Getting Real-world Graph Datasets, explores various networks in Gephi. Also, it describes the art of fetching data from a number of different sources.
Chapter 10, Exploring Some Useful Gephi Plugins, describes a number of plugins that are extensively used by researchers and developers while working with Gephi.
To run the various recipes in this book, Gephi version 0.8 is required. Unless otherwise mentioned, it is best to have the latest version of this software.
If you want to learn network analysis and visualization along with graph concepts from scratch, then this book is for you. This is ideal for those of you with little or no understanding of Gephi and this domain, but will also be beneficial for those interested in expanding their knowledge and experience.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Open the gephi.conf file and, in the default options, change the -J-Xmx512m value to -J-Xmx1024m."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The upper-left corner on the screen has three tabs namely Overview, Data Laboratory, and Preview, which represent the three modes present in Gephi for network manipulation."
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