Introducing Voyant RezoViz

Geoffrey Rockwell and I are delighted to welcome the newest member of the Voyant Tools family: RezoViz, a network visualization interface. RezoViz is actually an adaptation of the Halfviz example from the arbor.js library by Christian Swinehart. There is a dizzying number of graphing libraries out there, but we wanted to work with one that was reasonably efficient for larger datasets, HTML5-based (not Flash), easily extensible, and with an open-source license – arbor.js fits all of these conditions, and I especially liked the built-in editor of Halfviz.

Here are some of the more significant modifications that were made to RezoViz based on the Halfviz code:

• hovering over labels changes their colour
• labels that are linked also change colour, with little badges that indicate a value
• labels are drawn “above” the network lines to make them easier to read
• there’s an option to specify the maximum number of labels to show
• there is a search bar that produces results in the graph as you type
• edge (line) thickness and opacity are calculated dynamically based on relative values

Want to see it in action? Try the Humanist archives demo (that’s still a work in progress). I’ll post a link to the GitHub repository for the code soon. Keep posted as well for more news of full integration with Voyant Tools.