A Simple yet Useful Spiral Visualization of Large Graphs

Garima Jindal, Kamalakar Karlapalem

Room: 104

2023-10-26T03:00:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2023-10-26T03:00:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
This figure presents a Spiral Visualization on the Facebook dataset having 4,039 nodes and 88,234 edges. The Spiral Visualization uses continuous diverging color coding. Each spiral in a spiral visualization represents a community within the dataset. The radius of the spiral represents the size of the community. Each edge represents the existence of inter-community edges between two communities, and the edge width represents the number of interconnections between them. Nodes are ordered and colored based on degree centrality to visualize and compare degree distribution in spirals.
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Keywords

Human-centered computing—Visualization—Visualization techniques—Graph Drawing; Human-centered computing—Visualization—Visualization design and evaluation methods

Abstract

We present a Spiral Visualization that facilitates users to visually comprehend large graphs. Spiral Visualization is a representation that highlights key aspects of networks, including the number, size, and density of communities, important or central nodes within communities, centrality distribution within communities, connections between communities, and connections between nodes. To facilitate analysis and comprehension of networks using various interaction techniques, such as zooming, tooltip, and highlight, we have implemented a Spiral Visualization dashboard. We conducted a qualitative user study incorporating observation, think-aloud protocols, and participant rating of confidence and easiness to assess the usability and suitability of our visualization. The findings suggest that our visualization is appropriate for the network tasks evaluated. However, tasks requiring color comparison, such as identifying the densest community and comparing community densities were found to be more challenging to perform.