Interactive high-dimensional visualization of social graphs

Abstract

The paper tackles the problems of the “giant hairballs”, the dense and tangled structures often resulting from visualization of large social graphs. Proposed is a high-dimensional rotation technique called AGI3D, combined with an ability to filter elements based on social centrality values. AGI3D is targeted for a high-dimensional embedding of a social graph and its projection onto 3D space. It allows the user to rotate the social graph layout in the high-dimensional space by mouse dragging of a vertex. Its high-dimensional rotation effects give the user an illusion that he/she is destructively reshaping the social graph layout but in reality, it assists the user to find a preferred positioning and direction in the high-dimensional space to look at the internal structure of the social graph layout, keeping it unmodified. A prototype implementation of the proposal called Social Viewpoint Finder is tested with about 70 social graphs and this paper reports four of the analysis results.