The word cloud plugin

2023-04-10

last modified: 2023-04-10

== !

Gephi workshops

I organize online workshops and personalized trainings for Gephi, for beginners and experts. To schedule one or to get more information: analysis@exploreyourdata.com.

What does it do?

This plugin helps you explore a network where the nodes have a textual attribute. Let’s take the example of a network of 3,000 twitter users, where each user would have their bio in an attribute called "description".

You open the network, spatialize it with Force Atlas…​ then you try to make sense of it. Who are these twitter users in different parts of the network?

  • without the plugin, you need to make frequent back and forth between the Overview and the Data Laboratory to see the description of the nodes.

  • with the plugin, a window opens in the Overview, and it shows a word cloud of the descriptions of the nodes you are currently selecting with the mouse. At a glance, you can visualize and understand the most prominent keywords associated with the Twitter accounts your mouse is selecting: it becomes clear who these persons are and what they relate to.

When to use it?

This plugin is the most useful when:

  1. the nodes have a textual attribute, where the text is pretty long for each node. A description of the node, typically.

  2. the network has a couple of hundreds of nodes at least

  3. you don’t know perfectly the network

Conditions 2 and 3 reflect the fact that if the network is very small or if you know it very well, you don’t really need help to explore it :-)

How to use it?

Dr. Veronica Espinoza has published a great tutorial about it - go check it.

Here is the demo she includes in her tutorial above, to give you a sense:

word cloud demo
Figure 1. demo of the word cloud plugin by Dr. Veronica Espinoza

 

Where does it come from?

The plugin was developed from scratch by Clement Levallois (the author of these Gephi tutorials) on Twitch from October 2022 to March 2023.

Each episode of the series is chaptered, you can easily jump to specific part by looking up the description below the videos.

Check the episode 1:

 

to go further

Visit the Gephi group on Facebook to get help,

or visit the website for more tutorials

Give a try to nocodefunctions.com, the web application I develop to create networks for Gephi. Click-and-point, free, no registration needed.

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