Graph nodes size should also depend on word count in addition to no of links

In Graph view, the node size increases with increasing number of backlinks. But in such a case 2 notes having a huge difference in word count(say 10 and 100) have the same size. Wouldn’t it make sense to also take into account the word count to determine node size in Graph View?

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I don’t believe so; the graph view is for inspecting relationship (i.e. connections), not the content of each note.

Does that make sense?

3 Likes

Sure, just wanted to know what you guys feel about this.

I’m interested. Perhaps it could be a filter, as we are waiting to see other display filters in the graph-view in the future? (I think they are in dev right now, but not sure)

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@divesh_code – I think that’s a great question.

I personally would prefer to only have the node size be based on the amount of incoming links and nothing else. Just like Google used to rank the quality/authority of pages: By how many other pages link to it.

Ideally, and to your point: This ranking should be a preference to choose from along word-count and others.

At the moment, node size is determined by the amount of outgoing and incoming links to a note. To understand it better I created a dummy project and see how the graph changes. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Vault state 1:
I created three files:

  • The “Index Note With Outbound Links” (center) renders as the largest node in the graph. I personally would prefer this node to remain as small as all the others.
  • The “Index Note Without Outbound Links” (bottom right) with the exact same word-count renders small.
  • The “Authority Note” (bottom left) has no inbound links yet and remains small.

Vault state 2
I added a link to the “Authority Note” from all other notes.

  • The “Authority Note” now renders larger – Just the way I want it. Yay!

I looked into the code and from what I gather, it’s that for each link between two nodes, BOTH nodes receive an increase in weight while I would prefer only the “linked-to” received that +1. The weight property is then used in the getSize() method which I believe to determine the rendering size. I might be completely wrong though in my assumptions!

Anyways, I’m super excited for the upcoming graph filtering and hope we can all configure it the way we each want it to :smiley:

Edit: Formatting and added getSize() screenshot for illustration.

11 Likes

I think it would be nice to add a filter or toggle that does take into account other features of the notes. For example

Lines: back links, links, total links, common tags
Size:
Color:

Where size and color could be determined by a drop down of two features chosen from total links, only links, only back links, potential links (to already existing notes, without a formal link yet), word count, tags, etc.

So I could see linkages based on back links only, with size determined by the count of back links, and the color by the word count of the specific note. I could toggle the color to discretely highlight based on which notes contain a selected tag. Etc.

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I’d like this as well (as a toggle). Sometimes it can be helpful to distinguish between nearly-empty notes and large ones.

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Is there any chance of these changes being implemented? I love the default behavior, but the ability to toggle between size being determined by # of backlinks, and size of file would be super helpful.

When I am looking for my files with actual stories (with tens of thousands of words or more each), and am sloshing through hundreds of note & reference files with scores to hundreds of words each, having the files which contain thousands of times more data pop out would be handy.

2 Likes