Evolved VizColab : enhancing the visualization of brazilian academic collaboration networks

Abstract

Academic collaboration networks, graphs that depict researchers as nodes and collaborative works as links, prove challenging to analyze and visualize at a large-scale. This study improves upon an existing tool, VizColab, originally designed for visualizing a largescale Brazilian academic collaboration network. VizColab originally visualized these networks in three-dimensional space across three hierarchic levels: universities, graduate programs, and intellectual production authors. The study first enriches VizColab with a two-dimensional visualization capability, expanding the user’s viewing options and improving the tool’s versatility. A search functionality has been implemented, allowing users to easily locate nodes of interest within the extensive network. The study also introduces color-coding based on centrality metrics, offering a more insightful visual representation of network dynamics. To further support data analysis, tables displaying this centrality information have been added. Finally, the upgraded VizColab now facilitates the sharing of customized visualization setups, promoting collaborative exploration of the academic network. This enhanced version of VizColab delivers an enriched, interactive, and intuitive experience, effectively addressing the complexity of large-scale academic collaboration networks’ visualization.