GDot: Drawing Graphs with Dots and Circles

摘要

This paper presents a new visual representation of graphs, inspired by the dot painting style of Central Australia. This painting style is established as a powerful medium for communicating information with abstraction, and has a long history of supporting storytelling.We propose a general framework GDot to visually represent in-formation as dot paintings. We describe computational techniques as well as the rendering effects to produce painterly representations of graphs and networks. We present visualization examples with various networks from diverse domains, from pure mathematics to social systems. Further, we briefly describe the extension of our dot painting visualization style to multi-dimensional data, dynamic data and geo-referenced data.