How to visualize a large network in R?

Question

Network visualizations become common in science in practice. But as networks are increasing in size, common visualizations become less useful. There are simply too many node

Answer 1

I have looked around and found no good solution. My approach has been to remove nodes and play with edge transparency. It is more of a design solution rather than a technical one, but I've been able to plot gephi-like networks of up to 50,000 edges without much complications on my laptop.

with your example:

plot(simplify(g), vertex.size= 0.01,edge.arrow.size=0.001,vertex.label.cex = 0.75,vertex.label.color = "black"  ,vertex.frame.color = adjustcolor("white", alpha.f = 0),vertex.color = adjustcolor("white", alpha.f = 0),edge.color=adjustcolor(1, alpha.f = 0.15),display.isolates=FALSE,vertex.label=ifelse(page_rank(g)$vector > 0.1 , "important nodes", NA))

Example of twitter mentions network with 30,000 edges: