Visualizing Graph Data

Chapter 7. How to organize a chart

This chapter covers

• Layouts and why they’re important
• The force-directed layout variants and when they’re helpful
• Other useful layouts for specific data structures
• The drawbacks of 3D rendering

Unlike many other data visualizations, in a graph visualization the actual location of nodes on the screen has no inherent meaning. Nothing is different about a node that’s located at the upper-left corner of the screen versus one at the bottom right. This is in stark contrast to something like an XY scatter plot where the location of the item on a Cartesian plane tells you the value of specific properties of that item. In node-link-style graph visualizations, the location of the node is determined by convenience ...