Netwulf: Interactive visualization of networks in Python

Abstract

Network visualization is an effective way to illustrate properties of a complex system. It is an important tool for exploring and finding patterns, and is used by researchers and practitioners across many fields and industries. Currently, there exist a number of tools for visualizing networks. Networkx (Hagberg, Schult, & Swart, 2008) is a popular Python package for network analysis which provides limited functionality for computing layouts and plotting networks statically. Layout computations are done in Python or using the php-based software Graphviz (Ellson, Gansner, Koutsofios, North, & Woodhull, 2002), which is slow. Another Python package for network analysis and visualization is graph-tool (Peixoto, 2014), which relies on a high number of external C++-libraries for installation/compilation which can be overwhelming for beginners. Furthermore, its visualization functions have limited interactive features. Gephi (Bastian, Heymann, & Jacomy, 2009) and Cytoscape (Shannon et al., 2003) are dedicated interactive visualization and analysis software programs. They are both Javabased and run desktop clients with a GUI where users save and load networks as separate files. Webweb (Wapman & Larremore, 2019) enables interactive visualization for Python and Matlab networks using the d3.js (Bostock, Ogievetsky, & Heer, 2011) force layout. Its main purpose, however, is exploration of network features and exporting one-time visualizations as SVG or HTML.