Creating an example graph

Now that we've been through the process, it's time to have a little fun by following the preceding steps from start to finish using actual network data. Think of this as a bit of a case study where we put the theoretical process to work with a real dataset. The goal here is to get you acquainted with many of the capabilities within Gephi and to see how they might be used when you create your own graphs first hand.

So let's follow the process outlined earlier, walking through each step. Only this time, we're going to come up with an idea, retrieve the data for it, and create a network graph.

Identifying the topic

Choosing a topic for a network graph is not an easy task, given the hundreds of thousands of possibilities available to us, courtesy the Web and its numerous datasets. Even when a topic area is narrowed down to a specific genre (say, infrastructure networks), there are often multiple potential networks that could be created. Let's...