Get rid of vertex labels in graph plot in R

Question

I am working on a small project that involves finding community structure of the graph and plotting. I am using label.propagation.community algorithm for community detection and following line of code for plotting:

plot(community_1, graph_1)

It is working as expected, giving the following plot..

The problem is that the graph it is showing the vertex labels that make the plot look more congested. Is there any way I can get rid of these labels from the plot? I do not want to modify anything in the graph and community; just want to tell the plot to not print the labels.

Answer 1

For those like me who stumbled across this while knee deep in the attributes of igraph plots, the full list of graph attributes available in igraph plots is available here: http://kateto.net/networks-r-igraph

In section 5.1 you will find:

5.1 Plotting parameters

NODES

vertex.color Node color

vertex.frame.color Node border color

vertex.shape One of “none”, “circle”, “square”, “csquare”, “rectangle”

“crectangle”, “vrectangle”, “pie”, “raster”, or “sphere” vertex.size Size of the node (default is 15) vertex.size2 The second size of the node (e.g. for a rectangle)

vertex.label Character vector used to label the nodes

vertex.label.family Font family of the label (e.g.“Times”, “Helvetica”)

vertex.label.font Font: 1 plain, 2 bold, 3, italic, 4 bold italic, 5 symbol

vertex.label.cex Font size (multiplication factor, device-dependent)

vertex.label.dist Distance between the label and the vertex

vertex.label.degree The position of the label in relation to the vertex, where 0 right, “pi” is left, “pi/2” is below, and “-pi/2” is above

EDGES

edge.color Edge color

edge.width Edge width, defaults to 1

edge.arrow.size Arrow size, defaults to 1

edge.arrow.width Arrow width, defaults to 1

edge.lty Line type, could be 0 or “blank”, 1 or “solid”, 2 or “dashed”, 3 or “dotted”, 4 or “dotdash”, 5 or “longdash”, 6 or “twodash”

edge.label Character vector used to label edges

edge.label.family Font family of the label (e.g.“Times”, “Helvetica”)

edge.label.font Font: 1 plain, 2 bold, 3, italic, 4 bold italic, 5 symbol

edge.label.cex Font size for edge labels

edge.curved Edge curvature, range 0-1 (FALSE sets it to 0, TRUE to 0.5)

arrow.mode Vector specifying whether edges should have arrows, possible values: 0 no arrow, 1 back, 2 forward, 3 both

OTHER

margin Empty space margins around the plot, vector with length 4

frame if TRUE, the plot will be framed

main If set, adds a title to the plot

sub If set, adds a subtitle to the plot

From this, and as helpfully pointed out by @VincentGuillemot you can use the vertex.label parameter to manipulate node labels.

To remove labels, you can write:

plot(community_1, graph_1, vertex.label=NA)