Visualizing real-world networks

The study of networks has been propelled by improvements in computing power, enabling our ability to mine and store large amounts of network data. Moreover, the ubiquity of the internet has afforded us access to records of interactions that have previously been invisible. We are now able to study complex networks with anywhere from hundreds to billions of nodes; however, it is difficult to visualize large networks in a meaningful way. We explore the process of visualizing real-world networks. We first discuss the properties of complex networks and the mechanisms used in the network visualizing software Gephi. Then we provide examples of voting, trade, and linguistic networks using data extracted from on-line sources. We investigate the impact of hidden community structures on the analysis of these real-world networks.