Visualizing a NetworkX graph in the IPython notebook with D3.js

D3.js (http://d3js.org) is a popular interactive visualization framework for the Web. Written in JavaScript, it allows us to create data-driven visualizations based on Web technologies such as HTML, SVG, and CSS. There are many other JavaScript visualization and charting libraries, but we will focus on D3.js in this recipe.

Being a pure JavaScript library, D3.js has in principle nothing to do with Python. However, the HTML-based IPython notebook can integrate D3.js visualizations seamlessly.

In this recipe, we will create a graph in Python with NetworkX and visualize it in the IPython notebook with D3.js.

Getting ready

You need to know the basics of HTML, JavaScript, and D3.js for this recipe.

How to do it…

1. Let's import the packages:

   In [1]: import json
           import numpy as np
           import networkx as nx
           import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
           %matplotlib inline

2. We load a famous social graph published in 1977 called Zachary...