Users explore relationships among citation networks based on their own specified criteria. Users set rules of attraction/repulsion, and the papers rearrange in space to reflect those rules in real time. This allows the user to better understand the network and how papers and authors in it relate to each other. Ideally, users have some knowledge of the scholarly works in the corpus. This interface lets them see new clusters.
As research, this explores the viability of using multiple springs between nodes in a force directed layout to visualize a graph with multivariate edges. A graph having multivariate edges means that there are multiple ways nodes can be connected, thus connectedness is not binary attribute. Previous research has identified and made efforts toward addressing this, but ours is one of the first to support any number of possible connection types between nodes.