In this section we will provide some guidelines for visual network analysis by drawing on a practical example. Our case study is a network of websites and hyperlinks related to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development of Rio de Janeiro (aka Rio+20) <ADD REFERENCE AND EXPLAIN BETTER IN NOTE HOW THE CORPUS HAS BEEN BUILT>. The steps of the analysis are presented in the form of questions and answers, starting from the observation of the image and moving toward the interpretation of the data.
Before we can look at the image of the network, we have to produce it. A network can be translated in an image only by performing a number of actions and taking a number of choices. In the previous paragraph we introduced the three visual variable mobilized by visual network analysis. Now it is time to employ them on our example network.
The distribution of the nodes in the space is the first (and most important) step. Figure 1 shows the result of a spatialization obtained with the software Gephi (Gephi.org) using the algorithm ForceAtlas2 (LinLog mode, scaling 0.35, gravity 0.2, prevent overlap).