CommunityExplorer: A Framework for Visualizing Collaboration Networks

Understanding the network of collaborations, identifying the key players, potential future collaborators, and trends in the field are very important to carry out a project successfully. In this paper, we present CommunityExplorer, a visualization framework that facilitates presenting, exploring, and understanding the network of collaborations at once. The framework performs data extraction, parsing, and modeling automatically. It is easy to adopt and utilizes a bigraph visualization that scales well.We demonstrate the advantage of CommunityExplorer to identify the collaboration of authors on 346 and 104 research papers published in SOTFVIS/VISSOFT and IWST communities respectively. We found that even though SOFTVIS/VISSOFT has more contributors, IWST exhibits more collaboration.We discovered that contributors in IWST are more resilient than those in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT, which are more volatile. Moreover, collaboration in IWST is concentrated in a single large group, while in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT it is spread among many tiny groups and a few medium-sized ones.