Translate Gephi in your language

If you want to contribute to the Gephi project, you can greatly help us on translating the Gephi user interface. Lots of people are not ease with English. The goal of our localization program is to distribute Gephi also in French, Spanish (available since Gephi 0.8alpha) and other languages the community will ask for. In Gephi, simply go to Tools -> Languages to switch.

Getting started is very simple! Follow these steps:

1. Create an account on Transifex.
2. Ask to be part of a Translation Team.
3. If no team is set for your language, please ask to create one here.
4. When accepted, start translating it!

We launched the system this weekend, and people already started to translate in Portuguese, Arabic and Russian!

Note: when you start to translate a resource, Transifex grants you a “write lock” on it for 48h. It means that you will be the only one able to edit this resource in your language during this period, thus avoiding conflicts.

Read the forum thread to get involved.

Nodus Labs joins the Gephi Consortium

The Gephi Consortium is the non-profit organization (NGO) that help the Gephi community to grow. We are pleased to welcome Nodus Labs as an associate company!

Founded by Dmitry Paranyushkin, Nodus Labs is a creative bureau dedicated to researching communities, communication, and human interfaces through the frameworks of complexity theory, network science, and artistic practice. They develop ThisIsLike.Com – an online mnemonic network that can be used by anyone to retain and share their knowledge and and regularly do talks on analyzing one’s social networks, creating strong temporary communities, and write research on sustainable communities structures mainly for the arts field.

We actively use Gephi in our work and are dedicated to helping develop and publicize this software as we believe it’s a great user-friendly tool that can help people tackle such a difficult but omnipresent subject as networks in such an easy way. And it’s totally pleasure to use!

They will start a Gephi User Group in Berlin, please contact Dmitry to know more. The events will be announced on the Gephi blog.

ThisIsLike.Com

Slides of the ICWSM Gephi tutorial

Sébastien Heymann and Julian Bilcke gave yesterday the official Gephi tutorial at the ICWSM conference, in Barcelona. The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is a unique forum that brings together researchers from the disciplines in computer science, linguistics, communication, and the social sciences. The broad goal of ICWSM is to increase understanding of social media in all its incarnations. This is also a special conference for us because we introduced Gephi for the first time 2 years ago, at the 3rd ICWSM conference.

Thought the tutorial was not recorded, you’ll find here the slides of the tutorial.

SP1: Exploratory Network Analysis with Gephi

This month about 80 people were trained to Gephi thanks to the fundings we receive at our non-profit organization, the Gephi Consortium: 40 people at ICWSM, but also 20 people at UKSNA and 20 people at the French Complex System summer school. We will have our next talk at ECCS, the European Conference on Complex Systems. Looking forward to see you there!

Explore the Marvel Universe Social Graph

This week end at the data in sight hackathon in San Francisco, one of the winning team worked with Gephi and the cool Marvel dataset provided by Infochimps.

From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, Kai Chang, Tom Turner, and Jefferson Braswell were tuning their visualizations and had a lot of fun exploring Spiderman or Captain america ego network. They came with these beautiful snapshots and created a zoomable web version using the Seadragon plugin. The won the “Most aesthetically pleasing visualization” category, congratulations to Kai, Tom and Jefferson for their amazing work!

The datasets have been added to the wiki Datasets page, so you can play with it and maybe calculate some metrics like centrality on the network. The graph is pretty large, so be sure to increase you Gephi memory settings with > 2GB.

Data in sight – hackathon in San Francisco

Creative Commons, the Netherlands Office for Science and Technology and Swissnex San Francisco is organizing a weekend hackathon about data visualization in which Mathieu Bastian will give a demo of Gephi. The event is called “data in sight: making the transparent visual“, and runs June 24-26 at Adobe in SOMA (in San Francisco).

Join us for data in sight: making the transparent visual, a hands-on data visualization competition held June 25th and 26th, 2011, at the Adobe Systems, Inc. offices in San Francisco’s SoMa District. Open to coders, programmers, developers, designers, scientists, members of the media—anyone who believes that data is divine and has ideas for bringing it to life.

During the hackaton, Mathieu will help teams to code Gephi plug-ins or mashups. Ideas go from live data streaming to layouts, filters or web widgets. If you have ideas, please come to the forum to open a discussion.

Visit the website to learn more about the schedule, data available and advisory committee.

Gephi Tutorials at UKSNA and ICWSM 2011

We are very excited to announce that the Gephi Team has a tutorial session at both UKSNA and ICWSM conferences this summer!

UKSNA will be located at the University of Greenwich, London. The Gephi Short Course is on Wednesday, 6 July (2:30 – 6:30PM).
The UK Social Networks Conference offers an interdisciplinary venue for social and behavioral scientists, sociologists, educationalists, political scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, practitioners and others to present their work in the area of social networks. The primary objective of the conference is to facilitate interactions between the many different disciplines interested in network analysis.
website | registration | Facebook event

ICWSM Tutorial Day will be held July 17, 2011 (1:00 – 4:00 PM) in Barcelona, Spain.
The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is a unique forum that brings together researchers from the disciplines in computer science, linguistics, communication, and the social sciences. The broad goal of ICWSM is to increase understanding of social media in all its incarnations.
website | registration | Facebook event

Registration to these events is still open! The tutorial at ICWSM costs $150 ($100 for students). The tutorial at UKSNA costs £100 (£50 for students).

Program:

In these tutorials, Sébastien Heymann and Julian Bilcke will provide a hands-on demonstration of the essential functionalities of Gephi, based on a real case scenario. The participants will be guided step by step through the complete chain of representation, manipulation, layout, analysis and aesthetics refinements. Particular focus will be put on filters and metrics for the creation of their first visualizations. They will be incited to compare the hypotheses suggested by their own explorations. They finally will walk away with the practical knowledge enabling them to use Gephi for their own projects. The tutorial is intended for professionals, researchers and graduates who wish to learn how playing during a network exploration can speed up their studies.

Requirements:

Participants should come with their own laptop (and a mouse!) with Gephi installed. After the guided introduction, they will have time to work on a dataset of their own and receive help and direct feedback from the teaching team.

It is also a great opportunity to meet researchers and practitioners interested in network visualization, looking forward speaking with you all there!

New Tutorial: Layouts in Gephi

A new tutorial is available about Layouts in Gephi. It will guide you to the basic and advanced layout settings in Gephi. You will learn how to use various layouts in Gephi according to the feature you want to emphasis in the topology and the size of the network, how to avoid node overlapping and how to do some geometric transformations.

This tutorial explains when and how to use each layout, including:

• the new ForceAtlas 2
• OpenOrd
• Fruchterman-Reingold

Gephi Tutorial Layouts

View more presentations from Gephi NGO

Tutorial: Download it in PDF.

ForceAtlas2, the new version of our home-brew Layout

The new version of the build-in layout ForceAtlas is now released. It is scaled for small to medium-size graphs, and is adapted to qualitative interpretation of graphs. The equations are the same as ForceAtlas 1, but there are more options and innovative optimizations that make it a very fast layout algorithm.

It is good enough to deal with very small graphs (10 nodes)  and fast enough to spatialize 10,000 nodes graphs in few minutes, with the same quality. If you have time, it can deal with even bigger graphs.

Update Gephi (Help > Check for Updates) to get this new layout.

Force Atlas 2:

• Is a continuous algorithm, that allows you to manipulate the graph while it is rendering (a classic force-vector, like Fruchterman Rheingold, and unlike OpenOrd)
• Has a linear-linear model (attraction and repulsion proportional to distance between nodes). The shape of the graph is between Früchterman & Rheingold’s layout and Noack’s LinLog.
• Features a unique adaptive convergence speed that allows most graphs to converge more efficiently
• Proposes summarized settings, focused on what impact the shape of the graph (scaling, gravity…). Default speed should be the good one.
• Now features a Barnes Hut optimization (performance drops less with big graphs)

 

 

Force Atlas 2 features these settings:

• Scaling: How much repulsion you want. More makes a more sparse graph.
• Gravity: Attracts nodes to the center. Prevents islands from drifting away.
• Dissuade Hubs: Distributes attraction along outbound edges. Hubs attract less and thus are pushed to the borders.
• LinLog mode: Switch ForceAtlas’ model from lin-lin to lin-log (tribute to Andreas Noack). Makes clusters more tight.
• Prevent Overlap: Use only when spatialized. Should not be used with “Approximate Repulsion”
• Tolerance (speed): How much swinging you allow. Above 1 discouraged. Lower gives less speed and more precision.
• Approximate Repulsion: Barnes Hut optimization: n² complexity to n.ln(n) ; allows larger graphs.
• Approximation: Theta of the Barnes Hut optimization.
• Edge Weight Influence: How much influence you give to the edges weight. 0 is “no influence” and 1 is “normal”.

 

 

Force Atlas 2 was created by Mathieu Jacomy at the Sciences Po Médialab (Paris), founding member of the Gephi Consortium.

New Gephi Toolkit release, based on 0.8alpha

A new release of the Gephi Toolkit arrived, based on the 0.8alpha version. Download the latest package, including Javadoc and demos by clicking on the link below.

It includes all features and bugfixes the 0.8alpha version has, notably:

• GEXF 1.2 support (partial)
• Add Neighbour Filter
• Improve support of meta-edges in Statistics and Filters
• Edge weight option in PageRank, which can now be used by the algorithm
• VNA Import (Thanks to Vojtech Bardiovsky)
• Label Adjust algorithm 3 times faster
• Saving/Loading projects is faster and use less memory

Demos available on the Toolkit Portal have been adapted when necessary and tested. If you are intrested in using plug-ins from the Toolkit, checkout How to use plug-ins with the Toolkit.

Links you may be interested:

• Gephi Toolkit Tutorial
• Tips to use the Gephi Toolkit with other JVM languages
• Scripting plugin

This summer, the student Luiz Ribeiro is working on GSoC Scripting Plugin, a project to bring advanced scripting features in Gephi, using Python. This project will work with the Gephi Toolkit, and greatly facilitate its usage.

Meetups and Workshops in SF Bay Area

This article tries to give feedbacks on two recent Gephi events in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Gephi community is expanding and local events are the best way to meet and greet. We fully support any initiative, and are willing to help/sponsor any meetup or workshop you want to organize. Please contact us for more details.

Gephi User Group Meetup #1

This meetup took place in San Francisco, inviting the local Gephi users to gather around a glass and discuss the project. Hosted by Mathieu Bastian, Gephi’s co-founder, around 15 users showed up. The purpose of a Gephi User Group is to help users, but also developers interested in plug-ins development. For us, it is a great way to simply understand how Gephi is used and on what the development should focus in future releases.

The most notable fact is the diversity of the users: academics, hackers, startups, designers, media, data scientists and more. It’s amazing to see in how many domains network data exists and where analyzing them make sense. Supporting all this diverse datasets is also a challenge, and that was a strong endorsement for the plug-in architecture. Another strength of Gephi is its performances. I asked the question “How big are your networks?”. It’s interesting to notice many of Gephi’s users have very large networks, and are pushing the envelop on performances and memory usage in their daily use.

In general, Mathieu received excellent feedback on the software, praising the interactivity, aesthetics and the plug-in architecture. Users also mentioned that the documentation is still sparse and focus should be made on data transformation. Indeed, a major blocker is often to create a network dataset from an Excel file or a database. The Gephi Toolkit attracted a lot of questions as well.

Gephi Workshop in San Francisco

This workshop was thankfully organized by Kris Chen and Elijah Meeks, and hosted by Noisebridge in San Francisco. Part of the Data Visualization Group in Bay Area, this workshop gathered an amazing crowd of more than 50 participants, eager to learn how to use Gephi. Elijah Meeks is a Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford and one of the most advanced Gephi user. He ran the workshop, walking users through the complete Gephi process, from data import to preview. Mathieu Bastian was also present, helping users.

We hope to make more workshops like this, as it was a great success. Many Thanks to organizers.

The next workshops will be presented by Sébastien Heymann and Julian Bilcke at the UKSNA and ICWSM conferences in July!