Gephi is one of the most widely used tools for Social Network Analysis (SNA). It’s completely free, and it has most of the features you need for network analysis and visualization. In my experience, the high-quality images that you can produce in Gephi make it perfect for research and publication.

As with any desktop-based application, there are limited options in Gephi for customized visualization. Nevertheless, it is still one of the best options around if you are starting out with SNA.

Networking the New American Poetry project.

In this blog series, I will give demos on four things, showing you the process from the beginning to end: creating a basic visualization with Gephi; converting bimodal graphs into unimodal graphs for centrality measurements; generating quality images; and restructuring a dataset into node and edge files.

This is not a tutorial. Meaning, I won’t cover each and every functionality Gephi offers. There are already many tutorials and walkthroughs that cover it in detail. The aim of this blog series is to show you the workflow so that you can start your own projects.

Setup

You will need the following things to follow along:

  • Gephi: Download and install it on your computer.
  • Working Folder: Click this link to automatically download the working folder.
  • Spreadsheet: Microsoft Excel or something else (I use ONLYOFFICE). Because the working folder contains all the files you need to start working with Gephi, you can still complete the core demos without it. However, you will need it for the data wrangling section and for working on your own projects.

Once you have installed Gephi and downloaded the working folder, head over to the next post to begin.