Network-Style Visualization of Directed Pairwise Relationships

Create network-style visualizations of pairwise relationships using custom edge glyphs built on top of 'ggplot2'. The package supports both statistical and non-statistical data and allows users to represent directed relationships. This enables clear, publication-ready graphics for exploring and communicating relational structures in a wide range of domains. The method was first used in Abu-Akel et al. (2021) . Code is released under the MIT License; included datasets are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

gglyph: Network-Style Visualization of Directed Pairwise Relationships

gglyph provides tools for creating network-style visualizations of directed pairwise relationships using custom edge glyphs built on top of ggplot2.

The package includes four functions:

1. geom_glyph(): Create a network-based graph that illustrates pairwise relationships (statistical and non-statistical) using custom edges
2. process_data_statistical(): Process statistical data (e.g., pairwise t-tests) for plotting
3. process_data_general(): Process general / non-statistical data (any data with directional relationships) for plotting
4. generate_mock_data(): Create mock data for experimenting with geom_glyph()

They should be used in the following order: either 4 → 1 or 2/3 → 1.

Please note that the package has two licenses:

• MIT for the code
• CC BY 4.0 for the data

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("valentinsvelev/gglyph")

Use

You can use the package with real data as follows:

library(gglyph)
library(ggplot2)

data(pisa_2022)

data <- process_data_statistical(pisa_2022)

ggplot(data = data) +
  geom_glyph()

Or by first generating mock data:

library(gglyph)
library(ggplot2)

data <- generate_mock_data(n_nodes = 5, n_edges = 10)

ggplot(data = data) +
  geom_glyph()

Citation

To cite the package use:

Velev, V., & Spitz, A. (2025). gglyph: Network-Style Visualization Of Directed Pairwise Relationships. R package version 0.2.0. https://github.com/valentinsvelev/gglyph

Or for LaTeX users:

@Manual{,
  title = {{gglyph: Network-Style Visualization Of Directed Pairwise Relationships}},
  author = {Velev, Valentin and Spitz, Andreas},
  year = {2025},
  note = {R package version 0.2.0},
  url = {https://github.com/valentinsvelev/gglyph}
}