If you want to really understand network visualizations or see if some data you have contains patterns (and don’t want to code!), use Gephi:
“Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi is open-source and free.”
Gephi is a network analysis tool, one of the easiest to use: which means you can give it data, and it will create a visualizations of patterns in that data. The data does not necessarily need to be anything that would conventionally be called a network: load a database of spreadsheets about movies, or give it the text of every essay you ever wrote.
Digital humanities scholar, Martin Grandjean’s introductory tutorial to Gephi is very helpful. It contains many definitions of terminology (with images) and many examples: archives, twitter, social networks, books.
