You should install gephi 9.1 (the latest release) rather than an earlier version. Note that any later updates may not contain the key functionality that is needed below (as it takes a while for some of the plugins and features to catch up).
Before we do anything else, we need to install a plugin developed by Clement Levallois to convert Excel and csv files into gephi network files. To install the plugin select the Tools menu in the menu bar and then Plugins.
Gephi Portable Download
A second common warning with dynamic networks is that the year field is not correctly formatted. In that case, check that the format of the date/year field is what gephi is expecting in the underlying data. You can review the data in the data laboratory.
There are a range of other options for colouring nodes including a colour plugin that will detect if a column with a colour value is present in the imported data. This can be very useful if you have colour coded categories of data prior to importing to gephi.
Go to File and choose Save As and give the file name a .gephi extension. Do not forget to do this or gephi will not know how to read the file. If all goes well the file will save. On some occasions Java may throw an exception and you will basically have to start again. That is one reason to save work in Gephi regularly because it is a beta programme and subject to the predilections of Java on your computer.
Screenshots can be a very useful step in exploring data or sharing data internally. For publication quality graphics you will need to move over to using the Preview Options and engage in the gephi shuffle to progressively clean up the network for a publication quality graphic.
In the last exercise, we created a simple graph in Gephi. Next, we'll explore additional tools that Gephi offers to let us better see how different nodes are connected. There is also the options of filters to narrow the graph to just certain sets of nodes and edges. We'll be proceeding from the graph we built in the last section of this lesson, you can use the gephi file within the below zip file.
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