GraphMovie: A Library for Generating Movies from Dynamic Graphs with igraph

mjbommar — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:55:40 +0000

Over the past few months, we’ve developed a library for simply generating dynamic network animations. We’ve used this library in visualizations like (1) Visualizing the Gawaher Interactions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day Bomber and (2) Dynamic Animation of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit Email Network. Prior to these visualizations, we’ve used Sonia to produce animations like this one. While certainly a useful program for those without programming expertise, Sonia suffers from a number of issues that make it unusable for large graphs or graphs with many “slices.” Furthermore, in our experience rendering various movies a number of platform issues with the Quicktime and Flash rendering engines have arisen. Fixing these problems is possible, but Sonia’s large Java codebase makes for a steep learning curve. As a result, we’ve decided to release this GraphMovie class so that others can use or possibly improve this library.

In order to use the GraphMovie, you’ll need the following:

python (tested with 2.6)
igraph for network manipulation and visualization
Python Imaging Library for manipulating the image frames
mencoder from the MPlayer package for encoding the image frames into a movie

Here are the files, hosted on github:

GraphMovie: Example 1 from Computational Legal Studies on Vimeo.

GraphMovie_Example2.py

GraphMovie: Example 2 from Computational Legal Studies on Vimeo.

Computational Legal Studies™ » dynamic visualization

GraphMovie: A Library for Generating Movies from Dynamic Graphs with igraph