Graphdrawingaddressestheproblemofconstructingrepresentationsofabstract graphs, networks, and hypergraphs. The 6th Symposium on Graph Drawing (GD '98) was held August 13{15, 1998,atMcGillUniversity,Montr eal,Canada.ItimmediatelyfollowedtheTenth Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG '98), held August 10{12 at McGill. The GD '98 conference attracted 100 paid registrants from academic and industrial institutions in thirteen countries. Roughly half the p- ticipantsalsoattendedCCCG'98.Asinthepast,interactionamongresearchers, practitioners,andstudents fromtheoreticalcomputer science,mathematics,and the application areas of graph drawing continued to be an important aspect of the graph drawing symposium. In response to the call for papers and system demonstrations, the program committee received 57 submissions, of which 10 were demos. Each submission was reviewed by at least 4 members of the program committee, and comments were returnedto the authors.Following extensive email discussions andmultiple rounds of voting, the program committee accepted 23 papers and 9 demos. GD '98 also held an unrefereed poster gallery.
The poster gallery contained 16 posters, 14 of which have abstracts in this volume. The poster gallery served to encourageparticipationfromresearchersinrelatedareasandprovidedast- ulating environment for the breaks between the technical sessions. In keeping with the tradition of previous graph drawing conferences, GD '98 held a graph drawing contest. This contest, which is traditionally a conference highlight,servestomonitorandtochallengethestateoftheartingraphdrawing. A report on the 1998 contest appears in this volume.