GeoLayout and Dynamics

[sbodenmann]

Hi there!

I'm new to Gephi and currently exploring all its amazing possibilities. I'm working on correspondence networks in the Enlightenment.

1. Quick description of my network database:

My nodes are representing persons (senders and recipients of letters) and my edges are representing their respective correspondences (directed, in order to differentiate between letters sent and letters received). The edges got a weight attribute (number of letters exchanged). I’m using the Geo Layout to order my nodes.

2. The problems:

(a) The correspondences starts and ends
(b) My nodes are being born and die
(c) The geolocation of my nodes aren’t static but dynamics. The people are travelling, leaving a city for an other, holding new academic positions, etc.

3. My questions:

It was quite easy to let appear and disappear nodes over time (a) to simulate their birth and death. Same for the edges (b) to simulate the begin and the end of an exchange of letters between two nodes.

But I don’t manage to achieve (c): I tried to convert the attributes “latitude” and “longitude” to dynamic_double-columns but Geo Layout doesn’t seem to recognize them as valid input in the dropdown menu.

Am I missing something or is the Geo Layout incapable of dealing with dynamic data?

If last is true, is this a feature which will be implemented soon?

Thanks a lot for any answers and for this beautiful software

[admin]

Hi,

Unfortunately (c) is not implemented, and there is no plan to work on it. Is it data from the Republic of Letters?

[sbodenmann]

I'm not sure what do you mean by "Republic of Letters". Do you mean the Stanford project (mapping the republic of letters)? I am close to some of its members like the D'Alembert Team around Irène Passeron. But I'm currently focusing on the network of Leonhard Euler, trying to understand its importance in the much broader network of the Republic of Letters.

[sbodenmann]

If I may, I've got a second question which is related to my database but could actually be the subject of a new post. Is there any way to deal with uncertain timestamps. I've got some letters whith an incomplete or uncertain date: for example January 1752 but no indication of the day. Sometimes I only have a year but no month or day. I tried 1752-01-00. I failed...