Page History

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Ryan Cordell, David Smith, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon ""Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers," from Proceedings of the Workshop on Big Humanities. This project has already built an interactive network graphs that depicts text sharing between antebellum American newspapers: http://www.viraltexts.org/gexfnetworks/1836-js1860-masterwMagazines/index.html

Network Basics:What is a Network?

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Other more advanced tools include: iGraph, Cytoscape, NWB, Pajek, UCINet

Using Gephi

When jumping into Gephi, I've found the most productive thing was to first use easily accessible and Gephi readable data that you are already familiar with. Network graphs are not exactly the easiest things to make sense of, more often than not they are big amorphous blobs of "spaghetti and meatballs" that don't always tell a meaningful story at first sight. Thus, it's important to be familiar (at least somewhat) with the data you're using. So I recommend, if you have a Facebook, downloading the data of your Facebook friend network. First go to the Facebook search bar and type in "netviz." Agree to the terms and then click "personal network" This should start a download of your facebook network in a gdf file. Then open up Gephi, go to fille>open and select your newly downloaded file.It should appear as a large blob of nodes and edges in your overview screen.

The first thing we'll do to make sense out of this graph is adjust the layout. Go to the bottom left hand corner of your screen where there is a dropdown layout menu and select "Force Atlas 2" and then click "Run." The graph will continue to expand until you stop it, so once it spreads out enough to become manageable, click "stop."

Next, you'll want to go to the right hand pane of the screen under Statistics>Network Overview. Here are various algorithms you can run on your data to make more sense out of them. The first one we'll want is to run "modularity." This algorithmically detects communities in your data. For your facebook friends, you might have a community of family: ie. various family members who are all friends with each other but aren't connected to your other friends. After you run the modularity algorithm, head over to the upper left hand corner of your graph and select partition. Hit the refresh button on the side of the dropdown menu and then, in the dropdown menu select "Modularity Class" and click "Apply." Your graph should now be color coded according to the various communities within your Facebook friends: ie. College friends might be red, family might be blue. etc.