In this lab report, I pulled a dataset from Snap.stanford.edu that has a list of verified Facebook pages with mutual likes from different categories such as government, new sites, athletes, public figures, tv shows, politicians, company, and artists. The category I chose was TV Shows. The question I had was to see how many TV Shows had mutual likes. Also, how will this visualization exude that with so many nodes?

The method I used was searching through snap.stanford.edu to pick a dataset. I chose the dataset mentioned above because I thought it was interesting and should be simple to understand in visualization format. Then, I imported the .csv file to Gephi. I had a few challenges with uploading the dataset. With some support, I relabeled the columns in the CSV file to “Source” and “Target”. I was advised to add a third column to put “Type” and put “undirected” in the fields but when I tried to import it into Gephi, I kept getting an error message. I decided to remove the column and imported it again and it worked. Also, I had to make sure I selected the right table options when importing it to Gephi. Originally, I was choosing Nodes but then I tried “Edges table” and it displayed the graph better than the first time.

Here are some screenshots showing the process:

Once I figured that out, I started playing with the different configurations to change the layout and colors. I tried the Fruchterman Reingold and Atlas Force 2 for the layouts. I also explored the degree and weight of the graph. Here are some of the screenshots below:

I ran the following reports for statistics and modularity. Here are some screenshots. 

The preview and export were easy to do. Here is the file that I exported. 

Some of the challenges I experienced was being able to read the data. I’ve tried this project about 5 times to see if I can recreate it and get a better understanding of it. I followed the tutorial video but I think because the tutorial data was geographical I was a little bit confused about how I can transform the data into visualization. I was happy that I was able to get it to move and change colors. But it was a little difficult for me to understand and I wasn’t able to get the label feature right so I can actually see the name of the tv shows. Next time, I would probably see if I can do more research on how this work. I couldn’t really talk on the discovery of what I found in the data because I couldn’t see the labels. Every time I tried to zoom in, it disappeared. I need some more practice with using Gephi.