not that i know of, but there's a lot of research papers, under the topic of "graph visualization". we read a ton of these and combined and modified ideas for TALA.
The folks at ELK are doing fantastic work in public as an academic team out of Germany.
In general they are surprisingly readable even without an academic background. Sometimes they go into proofs of correctness like method X really results in minimal edge crossings, and those are gnarly math, but skippable. The bad part is that a lot of these research papers have code that's just broken or wrong, or is NP-hard.
