We’ve had some requests for ideas about how to make prettier network graphs, so here is one example, using the sna package for plotting, and the igraph package to calculate PageRank.

The help file for gplot is pretty self-explanatory, but Melissa Clarkson has produced the most thorough and impressive guide for any R function I’ve ever seen, to better illustrate some of the options. Seriously, you should leave is.R() now, and go look at that guide.

The network being plotted is a very small subset of the isDotR Twitter account ego network, hence isDotR’s high centrality. The key point is that there are a lot of ways to move beyond the igraph default aesthetic, and make a two-dimensional graph layout with many dimensions encoded into it.