Expanding and contracting subgraphs in metanodes
In the previous recipe, you learned how to select nodes in graphs and group them together to build up hierarchical relationships. In this recipe, we will learn more about the grouping of related nodes into a node referred to as the metanode and degrouping/expanding nodes from the metanode.
Getting ready
To get started with this recipe, first open the Les Misérables graph in Gephi.
How to do it…
The following steps illustrate how nodes in Gephi can be grouped as metanodes and conversely, how metanodes can be expanded into their individual nodes:
Group together a bunch of nodes using the previous recipe, Working with multilevel graphs.
Repeat this process multiple times for different groups.
To expand the group, right-click on the node that represents the group, called the metanode, and click on Expand. This will expand all the nodes that were grouped into that metanode and show a convex hull around all the grouped nodes.
For example, the following...
