Elastic Tree Layouts for Interactive Exploration of Mentorship

Abstract

Mentorship is an important collaborative relationship among scholars. The existing tools to visualize it mainly suffer from a waste of space, lack of overview representation, and less displayed attribute information. To solve these problems, we propose a novel elastic tree layout based on node-link diagrams, in which nodes and edges are represented as elastic rectangles and bands respectively. By stretching, compressing, aggregating, and expanding nodes and edges, we can: get a compact tree layout with high space-efficiency, display both the detailed subtree and compressed context in a single view, use labeling, charts, and node opacity to show multiple attributes. Besides, we designed various animated interactions to facilitate the exploration.