Visual Unrolling of Network Evolution and the Analysis of Dynamic Discourse

Abstract

We introduce a method for visualizing evolving networks. In addition to the intermediate states of the network, it conveys the nature of change between states by unrolling the dynamics of the network. Each modification is shown in a separate layer of a three-dimensional representation, where the stack of layers corresponds to a time line of the evolution. We focus on networks of dynamic discourse as the driving application, but the method extends to any type of networks evolving in similar ways.