Anticipating the future of network analysis

So we've seen in the course of this book the many wondrous things that can be done using Gephi, and we've still really just scratched the surface. There are now so many opportunities to process, analyze, and visualize network datasets that it can be overwhelming at times. Countless examples of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks proliferate across the Web, some of them thoughtful and powerful, some others far less so. Likewise, we have all seen many instances of collaboration networks, protein networks, cell structure networks, citation networks, and so on. Where does it all go from here? Will the future look like the present, simply with more examples?

One outcome that seems a near certainty will be the increasing involvement of end users in interacting and perhaps even participating in the creation of the eventual network display. Imagine a case where users can adjust and adapt to the graph on a real-time basis, affecting the...