Guide to Data Visualization

What is Network Analysis?

Network analysis examines relationships between different entities, such as collaborations between researchers, interactions between genes, or communications between people in a company. It can be used for a wide range of purposes from simply studying the structure of a community to solving complex math and engineering problems through graph theory. 

Network visualization is the visual component to network analysis. There are a wide variety of network visualization types to choose from depending on what type of data you have or what types of relationships you want to show.

Tools for Creating Network Visualizations

	Gephi Gephi is a free, open-source desktop visualization tool that specializes in network visualization and analysis.
	NodeXL NodeXL is an add-on to Microsoft Excel with a free plan. It allows you to create various node-link diagrams using Excel spreadsheets. Unfortunately, it is only compatible with Microsoft Windows versions of Excel.
	RAWGraphs RAWGraphs is a web-based tool that creates visualizations from copied and pasted data or uploaded files. Made with D3, RAWGraphs is not entirely focused on network visualization. However, it does have a number of options for visualizing hierarchical data and flows.
	VOSViewer VOSViewer is a network visualization tool specifically developed to aid in examining bibliometric networks, such as collaborations between researchers and relationships between publications.

A node-link diagram published by Twitter.

A chord diagram published by BBC news.

A sankey diagram published by the International Energy Agency.