Movement as an aid to understanding graphs

Abstract

We describe a graph visualization method that attempts to aid the understanding of graphs by adding continuous local movement to graph diagrams. We include a discussion of some of the many different kinds of potential graph movement and then describe an empirical trial that was conducted to investigate whether one kind of movement helps with a particular graph comprehension task. Although the results of the trial are promising, the degree of benefit afforded by the movement varies between graphs and we include a discussion about graph features which may account for this discrepancy.