LENS

Graphical Displays: Link Viewer


The Link Viewer displays values for all or some of the weights in the network. Links are arranged in a two-dimensional connectivity matrix. Each row represents a sending unit and each column a receiving unit. If drawing the links in the Link Viewer is taking too long (it's not a good idea to view more than a few thousand links), it can be stopped by pressing the Stop Building Link Viewer button in the Main Window or typing Ctrl-C in the shell terminal.

The Value and Palette pull-downs, the Viewer/Update After menu, printing, and the color intensity slider are all the same as on the Unit Viewer. Viewer/Cell Size and Viewer/Cell Spacing are similar to those in the Unit Viewer but they affect the linkCellSize and linkCellSpacing variables.

Sending Groups is a menu of check buttons that allow you to hide or reveal the links out of each group. Sending Groups/All and Sending Groups/None will reveal or hide all sending groups. Otherwise, you can selectively toggle individual groups. Receiving Groups lets you hide or reveal the links into each group.

By default, all units are displayed. If the network is large and you only wish to view one projection, interrupt the display building by selecting Sending Groups/None. Now choose only the receiving and sending groups you wish to view.

Left-clicking on a link rectangle will print the value being displayed. The values under the menu bar show some statistics of the links that are currently being displayed. These stats are only based on the links shown in the display. Mean and Variance are the mean and variance of the actual values. Mean Abs. is the mean of the absolute magnitudes of the values. Mean Dist. is the mean of the absolute difference between each value and the mean of the values. Maximum is the value that has the maximum absolute magnitude.

Frozen links are displayed with a yellow border.


Douglas Rohde
Last modified: Sat Nov 11 13:55:17 EST 2000