Social Network Clustering and Visualization using Hierarchical Edge Bundles

The hierarchical edge bundle (HEB) method generates useful visualizations of dense graphs, such as social networks, but requires a predefined clustering hierarchy, and does not easily benefit from existing straight-line visualization improvements. This paper proposes a new clustering approach that extracts the community structure of a network and organizes it into a hierarchy that is flatter than existing community-based clustering approaches and maps better to HEB visualization. Our method not only discovers communities and generates clusters with better modularization qualities, but also creates a balanced hierarchy that allows HEB visualization of unstructured social networks without predefined hierarchies. Results on several data sets demonstrate that this approach clarifies real-world communication, collaboration and competition network structure and reveals information missed in previous visualizations. We further implemented our techniques into a social network visualization application on facebook.com and let users explore the visualization and community clustering of their own social networks.