Gephi blog: Recent Episodes
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This new edition of the Gephi week takes place in Copenhagen, organized by Mathieu Jacomy who lives there and works as a professor at Aalborg University. It was a closed meeting, contrary to the Gephi week 2 years ago in Paris, because of the complexity to organize a public event. This one was smaller and streamlined: 11 participants in one meeting room booked for 5 days. So, what’s happening? I’ll give some personal impressions, interspersed with pictures I took of the event.
The event is pretty important because while Gephi is a passion for all of us, and needs lots of work to develop, the reality is that the actors most involved in the development of Gephi are all super busy with the rest of their lives. The week offers a place and a short window in time where these individuals can work and interact in a highly focused state – that’s 100% Gephi for a couple of days.
One highlight is the participation of Mathieu Bastian (Gephi architect) and Eduardo Ramos (Gephi lead dev), who could spend a few days together and work on the upgrading of Gephi’s viz engine. This is a long term project, started years ago and that perfectly illustrates the difficulty to move on complex subjects with constrained resources.
The promise is to get a new version of the viz engine that will easily accomodate graphs of the size of hundreds of thousands of nodes. Spoiler alert: their project is sufficiently advanced that they could show a demo running within Gephi, and yes gigantic networks can be opened and manipulated just like you’d handle a tiny one today. Looks quite magical. Don’t expect it to be released soon though, as lot of work remains so that the engine works for all platforms and edge cases – that’s many tiny paper cuts to fix.
Another big component of the week is the team of Ouestware working on Gephi lite, which is the web version of Gephi. Lighter than Gephi as the name implies, in the sense that it is not meant to include every feature of Gephi, but evokes a similar experience in terms of graph viz and exploration. It has a much easier learning curve, and it opens Gephi to the features that web technologies afford (modern UI, interfacing with other web services, etc.)
The Ouestware team was joined by Mathieu’s colleagues: Anders Kristian Munk, Johan Irving Søltoft and Lasse Uhrskov Kristensen who provided extensive user reports and insights on Gephi lite (the app being so young, there is still a long road to improve the user experience).
By the way, the development of Gephi lite opens interesting issues: are we witnessing the birth of a kind of “Gephi family” of tools and products? If so, how can it be reflected? Should “Gephi” be called “Gephi desktop” to distinguish it from Gephi lite? What about the visual identity of Gephi? Discussions were exploratory, and in practice the first concrete steps have been taken to redesign the Gephi website to explain better the different assets and use cases for Gephi.
On Mathieu Jacomy’s side, there was interesting work (actually still ongoing, the week is not finished!) on implementing the “connected closeness” algorithm, that he designed and published about (link to the paper, link to the very detailed Observable notebook). What does it do?
It is very simple and powerful: when you layout a network, this algorithm provides a measure of how “good” the layout is. What is “good” then, that’s the big question! A good algorithm is one that brings connected nodes closer to another. Hence the name of the algorithm. Can’t wait to try it!
Another ongoing contribution is by Emilien Schultz, research engineer at ENSAE, who acted both as a participant and an observer: he is interested in Gephi as a topic in sociology of science so he gathered information on the project, all while coding a project that would trace the network of contributors on Github who interacted with Gephi in some capacity. A network that would then be easily explored… in Gephi
On my side, I spent the week trying to increase the speed of the Force Atlas 2 algorithm, which is this high quality layout developed by Mathieu Jacomy and al., which makes the networks so intelligible. When the graphs are super big (thousands of nodes and dozens of thousands of edges), there are so many computations to be done to lay it out that it is very slow. After 3 days of work, I could double the speed, which is both great but also sligthly disappointing, as I had higher hopes. Besides this result, I learned a lot about the algorithm itself, which has many different parts. It will keep me thinking.
To finish: the atmosphere!
The atmosphere is one of intense focus: participants who made room for a few days to spend time on Gephi and so not wasting a minute. As the pictures show, the meeting room was often silent, just with the noise of keyboard typing. Many or most participants being French, some interruptions came to comment on the political turmoil in France. No tourism on my side except for great culinary experiences in the evening. Copenhagen has great food!
Next steps?
Check out the Gephi website as I’d expect its new version to be published in the not distant future. Then, push me to publish the “speed” version of Force Atlas 2, which is not included in the main Gephi code base yet. And try out Gephi lite, while waiting for the major update to Gephi’s visualization engine!
this blog post is a cross-posting from the blog of nocodefunctions.com, which is a companion toolbox for Gephi developed by the author.
How can we give back to Gephi so that it continues to thrive in the years to come?I am not steering Gephi, so please do not take the following as anything “official” nor definitive on the topic.Please check the recent posts on the Gephi blog by Mathieu Jacomy and Mathieu Bastian to get the latest views from the core Gephi team.
Ok, let’s dive in:
Interests should be aligned – and money makes things complicatedGephi is used by a large diversity of actors: students to governments, librarians, academics and professional scientometricians, dataviz designers, social media listeners, citizen journalists, fraud detection analysts and NGO volunteers to professional osint and infosec specialists and many more.
In this list of users, companies would have been natural contributors to the development of Gephi: “take my money, and in exchange I have a voice in Gephi to develop this or that feature”.However Gephi is a free and open source software, and it will not accept funding in return for a right to control how it is developed.
This stance is not a mistake nor a handicap!It is a conscious choice to evolve Gephi for all – not just in the direction that is set by the stakeholders which can fund it.But as a result, a very common resource – funding money – is not directly available to Gephi.
This simple absence of a market mechanism (I buy, you deliver) prevented Gephi from accessing resources that would have been so useful – and it is also why I esteem and respect the team who develops this software for so long, to provide it as a digital commons.
So, are we stuck? No!There are many alternatives to contribute to Gephi, in ways that make the best of your abilities AND with tangible feedbacks beyond the existence of Gephi itself.
This blog post will be expanded as I get your feedback: do you see new ways to support Gephi? Would you like to be cited as a contact point for any of those?
Are you a company or for-profit organization?1. Fund Gephi, despite the hurdlesAt the moment, there is no legal entity that is set to accept funding for Gephi, though it is bound to come one day.However, events sponsored by Gephi could still receive funding, through the university that will host the event or a similar channel?
What to expect from it?
The 2nd edition of the Gephi week (August 2022) has been extremely productive.It delivered bug fixes, new plugins, new directions for development but most of all it generated a renewed energy to participate and contribute.By funding the next edition, you contribute in a very concrete manner to making Gephi more stable in the long term.
Are you an academic?2. Make use of your unique power: citations!As a librarian, professor, student… a very impactful action in support of Gephi is to cite it in the bibliography of the documents your produce – in articles of course but in every publication really, including applications to projects and reports.These are the two papers referencing the tool you love:
Bastian, M., Heymann, S., & Jacomy, M. (2009, March). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. In Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media (Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 361-362). link
Jacomy, M., Venturini, T., Heymann, S., & Bastian, M. (2014). ForceAtlas2, a continuous graph layout algorithm for handy network visualization designed for the Gephi software. PloS one, 9(6), e98679. link
What to expect from it?Gephi has an excellent academic standing, with the original contribution cited more than 10,000 times and Gephi being mentioned in over 39,000 academic publications.Explicitly referencing Gephi in your publications contributes to making Gephi visible by making its impact measurable: it enhances its legitimacy and fosters adoption.And for you?Gephi having an established presence and growing reputation will make it easier to convince reviewer #2 that Gephi was indeed the right choice for this network analysis
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What about organizing an academic conference?I think that Gephi has actually never been the central topic of an academic conference . Would you like to be the first? This could be about Gephi itself, or Gephi in relation with your scientific specialty (network analysis, social networks, organizational mapping, biological networks, computer science, forensics, etc.). Gephi is part of a broader ecosystem of software for the visual exploration of networks: Cytoscape, NodeXL, Graphext… come to mind. Organizing a conference around these would make total sense!
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Grant writing!At the suggestion of a Gephi user and academic: it would actually make sense to apply for funding to any local / international research funding agency, where Gephi would be listed as an essential resource in need of financing. Either directly or through the dedication of a research engineer / research designer / data scientist position working on Gephi, within the project team… these are just initial thoughts.
I personnally would love the idea. I could also connect you to academics who would be outstanding contributors to such a grant writing project in France or the European Union. Do get in touch! (my contacts are at the bottom of this post).
Do you ever write tutorials, how-tos, blog posts?5. Write a simple intro about your experience using Gephi, help others discover itA classic writer’s block about Gephi is that “I am not expert enough” to write about it.You are probably much more expert than you think (see next paragraph), but in any case you can explain and document the use case that you worked on with Gephi.
This is a very, very useful contribution to Gephi.It makes it discoverable, easier to understand and it showcases what it can do.Again, a common conception is that what we do is never “original enough” to be worth writing about.Absolutely not: each dataset or research question has interesting specificities.Help fellow users understand what you did and how you did it!And if the case is confidential, don’t let it stop you!Transform and abstract your case and showcase the principles you followed.
- Shoot videos or shorts, any kind of social media postings are useful, tooI mentioned written pieces because that’s in my comfort zone.But videos, short or long, or posts on your favorite social media would be perfectly useful!
Examples
These are quite “high effort” examples, just to inspire you about the variety of formats. Do start with something smaller in scope!
- Medium articles and tutorials by Veronica Espinoza or Ifeanyi Idiaye
- A 20 minutes youtube video by Martin Granjean
- A personal website with Gephi tutorials by myself
- A company website hosting a blog, with a post dedicated to Gephi by OrgMapper
What to expect from it?
You gain the warm glow of knowing that you helped users discover what is possible with Gephi.Not interested in warm feelings?Then do it for the SEO, as Gephi is at the cross-road of network analysis, data science and data visualization: all SEO boxes checked at once.
Are you a beginner or moderately experienced with Gephi?7. Help translate Gephi in your language!Gephi is available in 22 languages, which is a good start but we can do better to bring the software to many other linguistic communities!Also, not all of the current 22 languages are translated at 100%.What you can do is participate in the translation!It all happens online, here.
Even if the interface looks intimidating at first, do register and get a start! And as always, don’t hesitate to request help on the Gephi Facebook group
- Chat and contribute to the Gephi group on Facebook!Yes, Facebook is really not anyone’s cup of tea.Discord, LinkedIn, Slack, a WordPress forum… all these would be preferable in some way and yet ten times less used than the group on Facebook.So we stay there for the moment.
The Gephi Facebook group has close to 10,000 members and is a very welcoming and friendly community.Join, post and read!Stuck in any way?Want to showcase a result?Definitely the place to post about it.And if you see anyone requesting assistance, which happens several times per week actually, have a look and it might well be something you have the answer to!Don’t be shy to offer your assistance, again my feeling is that we all tend to underestimate how helpful even a small piece of advice or assistance can be.
What to expect from it?
By giving back to the community, you are helping somebody who is a beginner just like you were some time ago. You help the community grow.Contributing to the Gephi Facebook group will also push you up on the learning curve by exposing you to a variety of cases, questions and solutions that you did not encounter in your usual flow of work with Gephi.A kind of learning platform!
Are you quite experienced with Gephi?9. Join the Slack group for Gephi!This Slack group exists in some form for many years and is used by the core developers of Gephi. I think it became more widely used at the occasion of the Gephi Week for 2022.
It is different from the Facebook group in the sense that it is a channel with a lower frequency of postings, with bursts of discussions around organizing and developing Gephi, rather than users helping other users. So it is quite exciting because you can see “Gephi in the making” but to remain productive, it should remain concentrated on that – steering and pushing Gephi forward, not really discussing how to use filters
If you feel that you could contribute to this kind of discussions, do join here. You are not absolutely certain? Do join and be a listener for the first weeks, and you’ll see whether you want to be part of the discussions or not.
What to expect from it?
Well, that is super interesting to get close to the core of the Gephi app and community! This is the place where you could learn about the things brewing for the next months, and suggest contributions you can make: in skills, time, money, credit, etc.
I would like to emphasize that on this channel the most important are contributions (things you can do), not suggestions (things others should do…). The entire group of Gephi core contributors are pretty overwhelmed already, let’s give them some help, not a wishlist!
Are you a consultant / free-lancer / slasher?10. Organize trainings and workshops!It is not always super clear that Gephi as a topic and as an asset is for everyone – it doesn’t have to be contained to the gephi.org website or in the Gephi software. You can develop a free or commercial and / or for-profit activity about Gephi. One obvious activity would be training sessions or workshops about Gephi, or any consulting activity in a given sector, leveraging Gephi. Maybe that when this gets clarified, we’ll see a broader offer for trainings in Gephi?
What to expect from it?
Designing a training or workshop about Gephi is always a great occasion to re-learn what had become habitual. Besides the revenues you will generate from it, it will also establish your credentials in the domain.
Are you an indie developer, a startup or a larger company with resources for R&D?11. Develop the ecosystem around Gephi!Gephi provides hooks of an outstanding quality, that make it super convenient to develop your projects with a strong base:
- the Gephi Toolkit is a standalone Java library that provides all the goodness of Gephi in of your projects, out of the box, with plenty of documentation
- the gexf network format, which the Gephi team developed, provides a rich description of your networks – attributes, visual features and dynamic dimension as needed
- the Gephi graphstore is the low level, standalone graph engine that powers Gephi and you could use it in your own projects too!
- Gephi lite, a web-based version of Gephi for interactive visualizations in the browser – read about it in the Gephi blog.
What to expect from it?
Using these Gephi assets in your projects will save you time, not reinventing the wheel of a network app that includes the graph itself but also the algorithms, layouts, filters, management of attributes, I/O machinery etc. that you will also need pretty quickly. By doing so, you serve Gephi as you will naturally get involved in pushing Gephi and its various assets forward.
Are you a developer with significant experience?It is on purpose that I kept this item for the end of the list. Indeed, we often assume that if we can’t code, we can’t contribute to Gephi. The 11 ways to contribute to Gephi listed just before have changed your outlook, I hope. Gephi really needs these 11 first types of contributions!
As a senior developer (or better said: not a full beginner in Java), you can also contribute to Gephi in several ways:
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Java developer: shine!Everybody has their own learning path, here is one:
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one way to get acquainted with Gephi is to play with the Gephi Toolkit, which is the Gephi headless library for Java. It will give you a sense of how the API is structured, with a strong modular architecture and some not-so-common design patterns (not familiar with SPIs? You will be served! ).
- then you might be interested in developping a plugin, which is another steep learning curve but very rewarding because, upon publication, your plugin becomes available to the entire Gephi user base (you can also choose to keep it private, of course).
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in the course of using the Gephi toolkit or developing a plugin, you might open issues on Github. And depending on your expertise and grit, you will also look at the source code of Gephi and find things to solve. This is very welcome, of course.
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Developer of desktop apps / Rich Client ApplicationsGephi is built on top of the Apache NetBeans Platform, which is the Rich Client Application of the NetBeans IDE. If you have a strong interest in NetBeans / RCA / desktop applications / or the intrincaties of targetting a desktop app specifically for Windows of MacOS, you could make contributions of critical importance.
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OpenGL for JavaI might be sloppy here as I have close to zero knowledge of the domain, but the visualization engine of Gephi is using OpenGL and that is of course quite a tricky aspect. I don’t have the details but Gephi is in the middle of a major upgrade of the underlying technologies for this OpenGL stuff, so if you or your organization is knowledgeable about this subject, you could also make essential contributions.
What to expect from it?
Gephi is led by developers who are first-class in their trade. Did you know that Gephi won a Duke Award back in the days? Contributing to this open source project would be a great learning experience for everyone involved and would speed up the delivery of key features. Gephi is also an open and free software: if you personally care about contributing to a FOSS, Gephi is a perfect choice .
In the endIf you’d like to contribute to Gephi in any of the ways listed above, a great place to initiate a discussion would be the Gephi Facebook group. I’d also love to get in touch! Just to discuss, give suggestions and point to the right person or resource. Don’t hesitate! I am Clement Levallois and my email is clement.levallois at gephi dot org.
How is Gephi made? Peek under the hood with Mathieu Bastian in this one-hour video.
It is primarily intended for developers who wish to get oriented with Gephi’s codebase, for instance to make a pull request or a plug-in. Mathieu gives a practical introduction to Gephi’s modular architecture, how its internal API system works, how the main modules are structured, and the build and release process.
This lecture was initially given to the participants of the Gephi Week 2022 in Paris (but we have cut the Q&A parts to not waste your time). It’s now on our YouTube channel. Subscribe!
The slides of the presentation are available down below.
introduction-to-gephi-codebase-and-developmentDownload
Gephi 0.10.0 is here! Download it from http://gephi.org (only patch versions auto-update, it’s intentional). This time around we focused on a few long-awaited features, while keeping our pace on code and sustainability improvements. This release improves the usability and reliability. Here are 5 highlights:
1. Quick searchSearching the graph was previously only possible within the Data Laboratory. There is now a global quick search feature that allows to find nodes and edges in the graph and highlight them. Each result can be acted upon with the same right-click operations found in the Data Laboratory. Quick search is brand new and we’re interested in your feedback as we plan to extend it in future releases.
2. Dark modeWe’ve introduced a new dark look-and-feel in a previous version but a number of components weren’t adjusted accordingly. We have fixed all of these issues and the dark mode is now fully usable.
New dark mode in Gephi3. Support for Apple SiliconGephi now supports the Apple Silicon architecture. As a result, both x64 and aarch64 bundles now exist for Mac OS. The performance improvements for M1/M2 processors is substantial as Gephi can now run natively on this architecture. It loads much faster and complex operations such as layouts run smoother.
4. Preview ImprovementsWe shipped two major improvements to the Preview module: arrows on curved edges and node border matching the Overview style.
Directed curved edges now have arrows as well. Previously only straight edges had arrows.
Node borders style now match the one seen on Overview: darker node color and size proportional to the node’s size. The border color and size remains entirely configurable.
5. Project and Workspace ManagementWe reorganised how projects work in Gephi to make it easier to use and pave the way for future features.
Gephi now keeps track of all the projects you’ve worked on in a project list. It’s also now easier to give projects and workspaces names so you can organise your work better. Finally, it’s now possible to duplicate any workspace with all of its settings.
New workspace managementList of improvementsYou can check our changelog in the release page:
https://github.com/gephi/gephi/releases/tag/v0.10.0
More about this releaseThis release is a follow-up to the code sustainability retreat 2022. You can read our report in our last blog post. Not all the features we discussed and worked on are included in this release but it certainly served as an accelerator. We also welcomed contributions from new developers with this release, which is great to see.
Check our road map as of Summer 2021 to have a better idea of where we are going. With this release, we continued to focus on core improvements that pave the way for future big features such as the undo/redo. Specifically, the core improvements to Project Management bring us much closer to it.
Mac OS UsersNote that some users have been experiencing hangs with previous versions, at startup or when switching perspectives. We are aware of the issue and unfortunately there isn’t a complete fix or workaround available at this point. We’re still working on it and you can follow updates on this thread. With this release we hope to have mitigated the issue, while we work on a complete resolution.
As usual, please share your experience/feedback on our Facebook group or on Twitter.
Authors: Mathieu Jacomy, Alexis Jacomy, Paul Girard, and Benoît Simard It is a spin-off For a long time, one could think of the Gephi as both a piece of software and a project; the purpose of the project would be to develop and maintain the tool. But from the start, our project was about more […]
From 29 August to 2 September 2022, about 20 people met in Paris and online to make the Gephi codebase more sustainable, discuss the project, experiment with potential features, improve the design, and get closer to the 1.0 version. It was a follow-up to the 2021 code sustainability retreat, and its theme was community detection. […]
We are organizing a second code sustainability retreat (check the first one), and we are looking for Java developers willing to contribute to Gephi’s core codebase over the next few years. It will be one of the two tracks of a broader event, the Gephi Week, the other one being dedicated to the question of […]
You may have noticed two things. First, we released several versions recently. Gephi 0.9.2 was released in September 2017. Then the version 0.9.3 in March 2022, with a 4+ years hiatus. Then 0.9.4 three weeks ago, in April 2022. Then 0.9.5 a week ago, in May. What is going on? Second, the splash screen. Version […]
Gephi 0.9.3 is here! Download it from http://gephi.org. No crazy new features, but many improvements and bug fixes. Here are 5 highlights: 1. No more Java installation required. Gephi is installed on top of Java, so you had to install it before Gephi. On some computers, a bug related to theJava path caused the infamous […]
From 29 November to 3 December 2021, 6 people met in Copenhagen to make the Gephi codebase more sustainable, discuss the project, pave the way to the long-waited version 1.0, and improve the tool overall. Before the event even started, it had already tackled its main goal. In this post we present what we have […]
We are organizing a code sustainability retreat, and we are looking for Java developers willing to contribute to Gephi’s core codebase over the next few years. Our goal: Make Gephi’s codebase sustainable, and beyond this, recruit a team of developers into the project in anticipation of a fundraising phase. We believe that Gephi deserves care, […]
This road map states, in short, Gephi’s priorities, long-term and short-term goals, challenges in various areas, and way to go. Project vision Gephi is multiplatform, open source, installable, extensible by the community, and with local-based files. Gephi is an opinionated take on network analysis, and is not intended to be the only network analysis tool. […]
Today at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) the “Gephi paper”, published ten years ago in the same conference, obtained the Test of Time Award. I (Mathieu Jacomy) attended the conference and received the award on our behalf. I had the occasion to say a few words, which I share […]
Despite Graph Commons, Graphistry, Linkurious or Keylines, there is no equivalent of Gephi in web technologies – notably free and open source. But what if? We gave a talk at the FOSDEM 2019 on that matter. “We” is Eduardo Ramos Ibáñez, our lead developer, and Mathieu Jacomy, co-founder and network science researcher, teaming up with […]
Mathieu Bastian has been our lead developer for more than ten years. He is now the proud father of an adorable little girl, congratulations! 🍾🎈🎉 At this occasion he decided to step down from his leading role in Gephi development, and hand over the reins to Eduardo Ramos Ibáñez. Mathieu has been the true architect […]
Note: because it’s a bit long, you can also read it on Medium. Despite years of collaboration, for the first time, Eduardo, Mathieu and I sit together at the same place. The Gephi community mainly exists online, and its members have few occasions to see each other in person. But we have to talk. Mathieu […]
A new version of Gephi has been released! Thanks to Eduardo’s relentless issue fixing, Gephi’s overall stability has been improved. Eduardo is the author of the Data Laboratory, and at this occasion he revamped its CSV importer for a more flexible and straightforward user experience. The new CSV/spreadsheet importer Did you know that Gephi can […]
A new Gephi version has been released and can be downloaded from gephi.org. This version is an update from the 0.9.0 version released last December and mostly addresses issues discovered since.
One notable improvement is a new localization: German! Gephi is now localized in nine languages (English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Czech and German) and we hope to continue the momentum on this effort in the future.
Other notable improvements include a better support for parallel edges, appending to existing workspaces and how filters are saved in .gephi files. More than 60 bugs were fixed with a majority of them reported by the community. Thanks to all users who took the time to help! The complete list of bugfixes and improvements can be found in the changelog on GitHub.
In the next few weeks we would like to focus on documentation as there’s still many features brought in the 0.9.0 version without up-to-date documentation. This is especially important for more complex features such as dynamic graphs, which got a major upgrade.
As usual, please share your experience/feedback on our Facebook group or on Twitter.
Last December we asked Gephi users to participate in a survey. The survey’s main objective was to better understand who users are and what kind of projects they work on. One important dimension we wanted to explore was the diversity of the user community. Through the projects we’ve seen in research and on the web we knew that Gephi users were diverse, but we wanted to quantify it. Ultimately, we aim to make the tool better so it supports users’ needs, but this is a process that requires first a good understanding of who the audience is and what are their objectives. Below we summarized our findings about the profile of users, the types of networks they work with and finally useful usage statistics the community can reflect on.
Profile The largest share of Gephi users work in academia. The project started in the academic sphere from where it has spread into business, artistic and non-profits domains as well. Working at a profit organization is the second most common occupation, which confirms that network analysis is no longer reserved to scientists.
Q12. What is your occupation? n=285; multiple choice
Given that the largest group of users works in academia, it is not surprising that the most common title among Gephi users is a researcher.
Q14. What is your title? n=285; multiple choice
The user community is also widely spread around the world. Users from 46 different countries participated in this study. This confirms the importance of localization for as many languages as possible (Gephi currently supports eight). While many countries were represented by only a handful number of participants in the study, large concentration of users is, as expected, in the US (23%) and in France (15%). Significant presence in France is predetermined by Gephi’s presence in universities and businesses within which Gephi was originally founded.
Networks Social networks are by far the most commonly analyzed type of networks when using Gephi. 70% say that they typically analyze social networks when using Gephi. Social media and semantic network analysis are also common and typically analyzed by 46% and 43%, respectively. The rest of the networks are less common with ecological network analyzed by about 5% of users.
Despite SNA (Social Network Analysis) being the dominant use there is a large variety of other use as well. That said, networks can be analyzed only if the data are accessible and we (the community) still have work to do to ease network collection and formatting.
We always wondered if given occupations are more likely to work with specific types of networks. Based on this study, some differences exist, but they are not as prominent as we have expected. We found that people working at profit organizations are more likely to use Gephi to analyze business and financial networks. While in total 24% use Gephi to analyze business network, it is 44% among those who work in a profit organization compared to only 12% among those who do not work in a profit company. Differences for other types of networks were not conclusive.
Q5. What type(s) of network do you typically analyze using Gephi? n=285; multiple choice
Gephi users commonly deal with a wide range of network sizes. Although the typical network has between 100 to 10K nodes, every size from <100 nodes to 1M nodes represent at least 10% of users. In total that is more than 5 orders of magnitude difference in data size, and without taking edges in consideration!
Q6. What is/are the graph size(s) you deal with when working with Gephi? n=285; multiple choice
Q7. And what is the TYPICAL size of a graph that you manipulate with Gephi? n=285; single choice
While more than half of Gephi users have never used Gephi to analyse dynamic networks, the vast majority of the community is likely to use it in the future. This confirms the importance of the set of features related to dynamic networks that has long been one of Gephi’s primary focus.
| Q8. Have you ever used Gephi to work with dynamic networks (networks over time)? n=285; single choice | Q9. How likely are you to use Gephi to analyze dynamic networks (networks over time) in the future? n=285; single choice |
Usage Both online and offline sources are important touch points through which people learn about Gephi for the first time. While web search is the most common way how people find Gephi, word of mouth remains an important channel and is not to be underestimated.
Q2. How did you first learn about Gephi? n=285, single choice
The community is very diverse when it comes to usage frequency which suggests that Gephi users are likely to have diverse needs. Occasional users are likely to have different expectations from a software than regular users. About one third uses Gephi at least once a week which confirms that there is a relatively large base of heavy users who use Gephi regularly.
Q3. On average, how often do you use Gephi? n=285; single choice
Online tutorials and online forums are key sources for users to learn about Gephi. This confirms the importance of creating and updating online tutorials. It also suggests that the community is well engaged to be able to provide answers one another on online forums and groups.
Q4. What source(s) have you used/are you using to learn how to use Gephi? n=285, multiple choice
Conclusion This survey is a first, yet important step in understanding the Gephi user community at large. It also gives a general overview of the network visualization and analytics field and we hope this can be useful for others as well. But for us – the Gephi leadership team – this will help us in our future community management efforts. It will also help design a better tool in the future as we better understand its user community.
In addition, talking about what kinds of projects users work on also helps shape the understanding of what network analytics is used for, and ultimately bring more people to the community. In the near future we want to double-down on this topic and start a series of articles highlighting the most interesting projects. Many of the respondents indicated their willingness to share what they have worked on so there’s already plenty to choose from.
Finally, to reflect on the diversity of users we believe it simply reflects that networks are everywhere. Analyzing networks bring insights and answers to many different problems.
Appendix * Survey was conducted among Gephi users community. While the results provide a unique view into the Gephi community it is important to clarify that they are not meant to be representative of the entire community world wide. * The survey invitations were distributed throughout the week of Dec 1st 2015 via email, Twitter and Facebook * Final data set contains responses collected between Dec 1st 2015 and Dec 23rd 2015 * A total of 285 participants completed the survey