The IEEE VIS conferences (Vis, InfoVis, VAST, SciVis) have accumulated 3596 papers between 1990 and 2024. Each paper record contains the list of authors, publication year, title, abstract, keywords, and citations. Author names have been disambiguated against DBLP (unique author identifiers are provided alongside the raw name strings).

A research analyst studying the intellectual structure of the visualization community wants to identify the major communities of collaborating researchers and characterise how they have evolved. The analyst expects that a community typically has a relatively stable core of leading researchers who continue collaborating across many years, while other members may move between communities over time or contribute to several communities simultaneously. Each community should also be associated with its major research foci — the topics or problem areas that characterise its work.

The analyst wants to answer questions such as: how many distinct communities can be identified? How stable is each community's core, and who are its leaders? What are its main research foci, and how have they evolved? How does membership overlap between communities, and how does it change over time? Do communities merge, split, or dissolve, and if so, when and why?

The analyst will need to inspect intermediate results visually and use domain knowledge to interpret patterns and make judgements at each stage.

Design an analytical workflow for this problem.