Gephi – a powerful data visualization tool – Like Photoshop™ for graphs.
Gephi is an open source tool that enable people to explore and understand large (or small) amounts of data and allows one to represent that data into a wide variety of graphical forms. The community of users describes it as “Like Photoshop™ for graphs.”
They have a interesting blog and community that is supporting the work and which provide many ideas for how to implement the application into your teaching and learning.
Once you dive in and take a look at all it can do, you mind will start thinking of all the ways you could use this with your students or in your life to visualize the relationships between your datasets.
Exploratory Data Analysis: intuition-oriented analysis by networks manipulations in real time.
Link Analysis: revealing the underlying structures of associations between objects, in particular in scale-free networks.
Social Network Analysis: easy creation of social data connectors to map community organizations and small-world networks.
Biological Network analysis: representing patterns of biological data.
Poster creation: scientific work promotion with hi-quality printable maps.
The application runs on all O/S platforms, and warns that it is still in beta, so it might be a bit unstable.
In conclusion, it’s worth a look to see how you might integrate this into your teaching and into Project Based Learning (PBL) coursework.