The workshop was a success. The workshop itself pretty much went over how to use Gephi and what it’s purpose is for. I learned a few helpful tips.
While I did know a majority of Gephi, there were small things that Chris pointed out:
- Think if the relationship between nodes is directed or undirected. Meaning, if one node has a relationship with another, but not vice versa
- Always use a single mode graph (meaning one type of node and the rest serves as the connections). Something my graph suffered from. Another reason for this is because a lot of the algorithms that Gephi uses is based off of single mode graphs. There is a plugin that supports multi-mode but doesn’t work very well
What I really want to show is a result of my conversation with Chris. Again, I’ll elaborate on this more tomorrow, but here is the basic premise of it (still a work in progress):
Essentially, the categories have become the edges (connections). The only nodes present are just the songs. According to Chris, this is the proper way to visualize a network. He asked, what are you showing with this project? Songs. Then the songs should be the only nodes. The rest will be the connections. That way, I can literally see how these songs are connected. I messed with the color way too much so it’s not a true representation of what I want. Each line will be colored depending on the category. What I have for the web, is perfect. It allows the user to explore the data easier, even if it does look overwhelming at first.
So what does this mean? I have found a way to show connections of only certain categories. More to come, but I’m happy that I went down there. The feedback was amazing.
Update
I’ve updated some of what I learned at the workshop. Since then, I have been making new spreadsheets. They are all connecting just the songs together. The actual connections can have labels. So I’ve broken up all the categories into separate spreadsheets. 
I plan on creating separate graphs for each category. I will also have one that shows all of the connections at once.