TY - JOUR T1 - Improving graph drawing readability by incorporating readability metrics: A software tool for network analysts JF - University of Maryland, HCIL Tech Report HCIL-2009-13 Y1 - 2009 A1 - Dunne,C. A1 - Shneiderman, Ben AB - Designing graph drawings that effectively communicate the under-lying network is challenging as for every network there are many potential unintelligible or even misleading drawings. Automated graph layout algorithms have helped, but frequently generate in- effective drawings. In order to build awareness of effective graph drawing strategies, we detail readability metrics on a [0,1] contin- uous scale for node occlusion, edge crossing, edge crossing angle, and edge tunneling and summarize many more. Additionally, we define new node & edge readability metrics to provide more lo- calized identification of where improvement is needed. These are implemented in SocialAction, a tool for social network analysis, in order to direct users towards poor areas of the drawing and provide real-time readability metric feedback as users manipulate it. These contributions are aimed at heightening the awareness of network analysts that the images they share or publish could be of higher quality, so that readers could extract relevant information. ER -