**UPDATE**: the version of the R code in this post does not work with newer versions of the igraph package (\> 1.0). I have posted an updated version of this post here: [Temporal networks with R and igraph (updated)](/post/2015-12-21-temporal-networks-with-r-and-igraph-updated/). Please visit the new post to use the new code and follow the discussion there. In my last post about how a twitter conversation unfolds in time on Twitter, the dynamical nature of information diffusion in twitter was illustrated with a video of the temporal network of interactions (RTs) between accounts. The temporal evolution of the network yields to another perspective of social structure and, in some cases, aggregating the data in a time window might blur out important temporal structures on information diffusion, community or opinion formation, etc. Although many of the commercial and free Social Network Analysis software have tools to visualize static networks, there are no so many options out there for dynamical networks. And in some cases they have very limited options for their “dynamical layout”. A notable exception is SoNIA, the Java-based package, which unfortunately is not updated frequently. Another possibility is to work with the Timeline plugin in Gephi. However there is no video recording possibility for the animations. In this post I will show you how to render the network at each time step and how to encode all snapshots into a video file using the igraph package in R and ffmpeg. The idea is very simple
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