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Gephi

Gephi is a free and open-source (FOSS) software package for performing exploratory analysis and visualisations of networks and graph data. Gephi can visualise networks of up to 100,000 nodes and 1,000,000 edges. It provides multiple layout algorithms for visualisations and affords dynamic, interactive filtering of the resulting graph or network. It also includes a framework for calculating common statistics and metrics for social network analysis (SNA) and scale-free networks including Betweennes Centrality, Closeness, Diameter, Clustering Coefficient, Pagerank, Community Detection (Modularity) and Shortest Path. Finally, Gephi also has the capability to visualise evolution of the graph or network over time.

Personal Experience

I've primarily used Gephi for visualisation of Twitter data. Typically I've captured that data from the Twitter API with Python, pre-processed the data with Python's NetworkX package for Graph analysis, and then exported in the GraphML format for visualisation in Gephi.

Tools & Software Integrations

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Resources

Notes and Troubleshooting

Enable Dark Mode

Gephi 0.10 includes a dark mode. This can be activated with the following steps: 1. Menu Tools > Options 2. Click on 'Appearance'. 3. Select the 'Look and Feel' tab. 4. Select the 'FlatLaf Dark' option from the dropdown. 5. Click 'Apply'. 6. Click 'Ok'. 7. Restart Gephi for the changes to take effect.

Modify Memory Settings

The memory allocated to Gephi is set automatically by Java automatically. The maximum amount of memory available allocated can be changed by editing Gephi’s startup settings:

  1. Close Gephi.
  2. Navigate to the gephi.conf settings file.
    • On Windows, navigate to the Gephi folder in Start menu and click on 'Startup Settings' or manually navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Gephi 0.9.3\etc\gephi.conf.
  3. Modify the 'default_options' line and add a 1-J-Xmx2048m option to set the maximum heap space. Here it is set to 2G (2048m).

NOTE: If more memory is set than is available to the system Java will fail to start and return 'JVM Creation failed' message.

Source: https://gephi.org/users/install/