Chronoblox: Chronophotographic Sequential Graph Visualization

TL;DR

Chronoblox is a visualization system that represents dynamic graphs over time using a unified embedding space, enabling clear visualization of local and global structural changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for visualizing dynamic graphs through a common embedding space, facilitating the understanding of temporal structural evolution.

Findings

Effective visualization of synthetic network dynamics.

Clear depiction of micro to meso structural evolution.

Application to real-world retweet network demonstrates practicality.

Abstract

We introduce Chronoblox, a system for visualizing dynamic graphs. Chronoblox consists of a chronophotography of a sequence of graph snapshots based on a single embedding space common to all time periods. The goal of Chronoblox is to project all snapshots onto a common visualization space so as to represent both local and global dynamics at a glance. In this short paper, we review both the embedding and spatialization strategies. We then explain the way in which Chronoblox translates micro to meso structural evolution visually. We finally evaluate our approach using a synthetic network before illustrating it on a real world retweet network.