A easy to use tool that allows you to build simple visualizations of networks to publish or embed them in your website, without coding, in just a few minutes. NodeMapper is currently in early proof of concept version. In order to improve it and make it useful, we are looking for journalists, designers, developers, academics, civic advocates, newsrooms and organizations interested in testing NodeMapper with real data. If you want to join the alpha tester group, add your contact info here.

• What is this?
• What is it for and what it is not for
• How can you use it?
• How to run NodeMapper
• How to contribute
• Credits

NodeMapper is a easy network visualization builder using data from a Google Spreadsheet template. It allows you to build simple visualizations of networks to publish or embed them in your website, without coding, in just a few minutes. The goal of NodeMapper is to expand and democratize the use of data to do network visualizations for storytelling by people and organizations that don`t have access to programmers, opening new possibilities for anyone interested in creating and publishing visualizations of connections, in a fast and simple way. For more information on the project and how to contribute, please see Roadmap, features and user research. NodeMapper is a free open source software free open source software by Poderomedia, developed by Kevin Hu, Manuel Aristarán and Miguel Paz. You can fork it and deploy it with your own modifications. Please see the License file for details.

This tool has some end user assumptions:

• You know what you want to show as a network visualization.
• You want to publish a network visualization, not analyze it.
• You have a story to tell and including a network visualization can give your story more depth and visual context.
• It`s designed for small network graphs (20 to 30 nodes average, around 100 nodes max. for clarity), not for big hairballs
• It should help people show and tell relevant relations giving nodes and edges (entities and connections) weight and as much context as possible. Not give 2 very different relations the same weight. For example: conspiracy theorist believe that if you are member of the board of X, then you are part of a global secret ruling group lead by Y. Providing good examples and guidelines can help with user behaviour.
• It should help people become “network visualization” savvy to learn the basic concepts to grow from then to more complex projects.

• Open the Spreadsheet template.
• Add data into the spreadsheet template. You can follow this tutorial. PENDING
• Publish the spreadsheet to the web
• Copy the url of published spreadsheet
• Pase the url it in the url field of PENDING
• Click on load data, choose settings, preview and save the network visualization
• Copy the url of the network visualization to share it with others or
• Copy the embed code and paste it in your website

Build Process

1. Run npm install to install development dependencies

2. Run gulp (if you have gulp installed globally) else run ./node_modules/.bin/gulp

Want to help us make NodeMapper awesome? Great! Please open and issue for code, feature ideas, bugs, etc.

Kevin Hu, Manuel Aristarán, Miguel Paz.

Poderomedia would like to give a special thank you to Kevin and Manuel for contributing their time and enthusiasm to develop the first proof of concept of NodeMapper. Acknowledgments go as well for their help and feedback to César Hidalgo (director of the MacroConnections Group at MIT MediaLab), Ethan Zuckerman (director of the Civic Media Group at MIT MediaLab), the 2015 Nieman fellows and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellows of 2015.