Martin Krzywinski has a fascinating article up about an alternative to what he calls “hairballs” in network visualizations that creates not only visually appealing graphs, but graphs with significantly improved analytical features.

In this layout, nodes are constrained to linear axes and edges are drawn as curves between nodes. Node position is determined solely by network structure, node, edge annotation, or any other meaningful properties of the network. In other words, layout rules are defined by you based on what properties that are meaningful to you. These rules form a mapping between structure and layout can be as simple or complex as you wish.

I’m still having some difficulty understanding how he maps certain information onto this new visualization, but I have to admit it seems to be much ‘cleaner’ than traditional network graphs.  He shows it in use for parallel axes, stacked bar graphs, and a few other visualization strategies. I plan to read it further, and recommend you do too!

via Linear Layout for Network Visualization – Visually Interpreting Network Structure and Content Made Possible.