Everything is a Network, featuring the sna package

We’ve gotten some requests, through the Ask us anything page, to do some plotting of networks. We may come back to this later, but today’s Gist shows how you can plot pretty much literally anything as a network.

First, we go back to our well-worn folder of flag PNGs from GoSquared, and load data for each pixel of each flag. Then, we binarize the dissimilarity matrix of these flags, with a cutoff chosen to ensure that the entire graph is a single connected component (this is done just for the purposes of this example; in Real Life, you are likely to have an actual network you want to plot).

Then, we plot the network conventionally, using gplot from sna, but save the vertex coordinates. Finally, we replot the graph edges put overplot the vertices with the flag rasters that we have come to know and love.

Fun “fact”: the flag of the Seychelles has the highest eigenvector centrality, while the flag of the Vatican City has the lowest!