Students who are pursuing their course on Social Network Analysis in some form or the other, can use Gephi, a free software which can be used to visualize and manipulate graphs. Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of social / other networks and complex systems.It can also process dynamic and hierarchical graphs. It runs on various platforms which include Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. LinkedIn maps is also based on Gephi tool with some modifications.
Some of the applications of Gephi are:
- Exploratory Data Analysis
- Link Analysis
- Social Network Analysis
- Biological Network analysis
- Poster creation
Some of the technological aspects of Gephi are:
- Ergonomic interface: It is based on NetBeans UI
- High-performance: It has a built-in 3D rendering engine
- Native file formats: GDF (GUESS), GraphML (NodeXL), GML, NET (Pajek), GEXF, etc are some of the file formats which are supported by Gephi
- Customizable by plugins: layouts, metrics, data sources, manipulation tools, rendering presets, etc.
Now, it is very easy to use Gephi to do data analysis of facebook data for bipartite network. The following steps may be used to do the above mentioned analysis:
- Login to Facebook through an user account & ‘like’ the facebook page for which analysis needs to be done.
- Using the Netvizz app (http://apps.facebook.com/netvizz/) on Facebook extract a dataset for a bipartite network containing users and posts
- Download 1 gdf format file and 2 tsv format files (total 3 files)
- Open the gdf format file using Gephi and analyze
- Open the tsv format file using Microsoft Excel
Using Gephi's layout tool, statistics tool and filter tool, various analysis on degree, betweenness and closeness centrality, network density, path length, diameter, HITS, modularity, clustering coefficient, etc can be obtained.
Some Modularity analysis on Gephi can be shown as below:
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