The depicted network was created as an introduction to Gephi and network visualization (Image 1). The Marvel Network depicts the relationships between Marvel comic book characters by examining when characters appear in each other’s universe. The dataset is provided from the Gephi Github and was not altered from the original gephi file. The network is unbelievably large, rendering a majority of the nodes and edges undetectable.

At first, the major problem was overlap between nodes but reducing the gravity and allowing the network to spread had its own drawbacks. The network size slows the process of transforming the data, and the close relationships between many nodes prevents the network cloud from spreading easily. In this network, the size of the nodes indicates the number of connections within the network, large nodes have more connections and the size of a node decreases with the number of connections. This creates a network that draws the most popular and well-known characters to the surface.

The colors selected show a directional relationship across edges between characters, representing the appearance within another’s universe. The color of the nodes reflects this connection and creates the color clusters seen here. The color clusters generally represent major superhero groups; such as the Iron Man, X-Men, Spiderman, and Captain America universes (Image 2).

The clusters also indicate characters that often appear together in the same story or universe. Captain America, seen in orange, is clustered tightly with the Iron Man universe (Image 3). The characters around them, including Thor, Black Widow, Hawk, and Hulk, are easily identified as the Avengers. Overall, the network was fairly easy to manipulate, although it is not easy to read clearly due to the massive size. The size of the data is excellent for practicing Gephi tools and features when manipulating massive networks.