Text Network Analysis: Generate Beautiful Network Visualisations

Discover how to visualize text networks in the circular, radial, and matrix forms: circos, hive, and matrix plots. At the same time, learn the dos and don’ts of plotting text networks.

Figure 1. Text network plot via Pyvis. Image by author

Introduction

This article develops a series on text network analysis in Python. It builds on Text Network Analysis: Theory and Practice, laying down the fundamentals of text networks, and Text Network Analysis: A Concise Review of Network Construction Methods, focusing on data preparation and network construction strategies.

The last article split the strategies for constructing a text network into (i) net is drawn from the raw text, and (ii) the net is built on the pre-processed data with the edges and nodes clearly defined. In this article, we will expand the second option and use the pre-processed classic IMDb 50K Movie Reviews (see the data license) to illustrate the following network graphics:

• circos plot: to visualize a network in a circular layout
• hive plot: to structure the network graph along several axes
• matrix plot: to plot a net in its matrix form.