I'm working on this project where I'm analysing the "closeness" of a person with his Twitter friends and followers. The closeness is measured on the basis of how many times the subject mentions others or is mentioned by others.
At the end of it I have this metric of "weight" of a connection. I want to create a visualization for the same where the subject is at the center and is surrounded by his friends/followers. I want the friends/followers with higher weight to be closer to the subject and as the weight of a connection decreases, it goes further and further away from the subject.
I am currently using Graph Dracula to generate force directed graphs for the same. Is it possible to ensure that some nodes are always closer to the subject than others or is my understanding of force directed graph visualizations all wrong ?
Its an open source project you can find here and incase you want to see it in action, try it here.
Its by no means complete and hence please ignore (or report) any bugs or anything you might find. And yes only Chrome for now.
Sure it's possible; basically all you want to do is apply a force function that takes edge weight into account. If the implementation you're using doesn't support providing your own force function, you may want to just hack it so it does (and maybe submit a patch, if you're feeling like a responsible community member).