A Note on the Self-similarity of Some Orthogonal Drawings

Large graphs are difficult to browse and to visually explore. This note adds up evidence that some graph drawing techniques, which produce readable layouts when applied to medium-size graphs, yield self-similar patterns when launched on huge graphs. To prove this, we consider the problem of assessing the self-similarity of graph drawings, and measure the box-counting dimension of the output of three algorithms, each using a different approach for producing orthogonal grid drawings with a reduced number of bends.