Info & Instructions
Requirements: This is a java applet. If it doesn't work for you, go download and install the latest java plugin.
Exploring the graphs:
The data are presented in two views: a graph of authors and a graph of
papers. In the graph of authors, two authors are connected if
they have ever been on a paper together (more shared papers = thicker edge), and in the graph of papers,
the connections represent citations. You can use the checkboxes
at the upper right to hide one of the graphs to give you more room to
work in. When you bring a graph back after hiding it, it takes a
few moments to appear.
Click and drag anywhere besides a node to move the graph around.
The drawing is done with a fisheye distortion, so stuff near the middle
will be more spread out. (By clicking on the "Fisheye" radio
button below the graph and then moving the slider below it, you can
control the degree of distortion.) Click and drag on a node to fiddle with the layout.
Hover over a paper to see the full title. Hover over an edge in
the authors graph to see a list of papers on which the two authors it
connects have collaborated.
Use the "Node Labels" checkbox to switch between two ways of seeing the
nodes: with labels showing their names/titles or as circles with area
proportional to the number of papers/number of citations that node has.
Selecting Nodes: Click on a
node to select it. When you select a node, only nodes within a
certain maximum distance (measured in number of hops in the graph) will
be drawn. You can change this maximum distance by selecting the
"Radius" radio button below the graph and then moving the slider below
it. Selecting a node will also limit drawing to related nodes in
the other graph. That is, if you select a paper in the papers
graph, only authors on that paper and their immediate collaborators are
shown in the authors graph.
To recover hidden nodes, you can click on the "Show all nodes"
button. In all cases, the set of nodes you can see is subject to
a filter. For authors, this is a minimum number of published papers, set
with a control below the authors graph. For papers, it is a
minimum number of citations and a range of years.
The little gray box with a number drawn at the upper right hand corner
of each node indicates the number of undrawn neighbors of that
node. An asterisk (*) means there are more than nine hidden
neighbors. These neighbors are not visible either because they
are
beyond the specified radius of the selected node or because they don't
pass the current filter settings.
Searching: You can search
for papers by title or for authors by name using the search boxes below
each graph. Type in the name and hit enter. The result will
only be shown if the object of your search passes the current filter
settings.
Animation: The animation
button and scrollbar at the top of the graph is used to light up nodes
and edges according to which year the papers they represent were
published. The scrollbar runs through all years from
1974-2003. This feature is intended to give you a high-level feel
for the general times and order in which papers were published and
collaborations took place.
Getting the papers
Right-click on a paper to get a menu that lets you see detailed info
about the paper or to download it as a PDF. These functions will
only work if you have access to the ACM digital library.
I wrote this applet together with Daniel Horn as a project in a seminar
course on visualization. It is a modification/extension of the
Touchgraph graph layout applet created by Alexander Shapiro.