Using Gephi to visualize graphs
Gephi is an open source application for the visualization and analysis of complex networks. The package can run on any platform that runs Java, so you can use it in Windows, Linux, or Mac environments.
To obtain your copy of Gephi, go to https://gephi.org/users/download/ and download the package appropriate for your system. After downloading, follow the prompts to install the package.
We have had many problems trying to run version 0.8.2-beta of Gephi on Mac OS X El Capitan. The newest version of Gephi uses Java libraries that do not work well with the Java version shipped with the Mac OS X (see, for example, https://github.com/gephi/gephi/issues/1141). Even installing the legacy package with Java 6 as suggested in the aforementioned thread did not allow us to run Gephi 0.8.2-beta; only downgrading to version 0.8.1-beta did the trick. Thus, all the visualizations presented in this recipe come from the 0.8.1-beta version.
Getting ready
For this recipe, you will...