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Category: Network Visualization

• News Topics as Social Network

  Posted Feb 26, 2010 to Network Visualization / 6 comments

  

  All news is connected in some way or another. News Dots from Slate shows just that.

  News Dots scans all articles from major publications—about 500 stories a day—and submits them to Calais, a service from Thompson Reuters that automatically "tags" content with all the important keywords: people, places, companies, topics, and so forth. Slate's tool registers any tag that appears at least twice in a story.

  Bubbles are sized by how much the corresponding topic is written about, and connections are made when topics are mentioned in the same article. Click on a topic to see the matching articles in the sidebar.

  How everything is placed I'm not exactly sure. I'm guessing distance represents some abstract measurement of relatedness. You guys have any better guesses?

• Track Mouse Activity On Your Computer

  Posted Feb 9, 2010 to Network Visualization, Self-surveillance / 74 comments

  

  Anatoly Zenkov provides this nifty tool (Mac and PC) to track your mouse pointer. Really simple. Just start it, let it run, minimize the window, and carry on as usual. In the end, you get this image that looks something like a Pollock. Circles show areas where the pointer didn't move while the tracks show movement.
  Continue Reading

• The Most Efficient Way to Type

  Posted Feb 2, 2010 to Network Visualization / 13 comments

  

  Are you using the most efficient typing technique or are your fingers jumping all over the keyboard? If it's the latter, I implore you - there is a better way. Your arms don't have to be tired after typing for ten minutes, and you just might finish that novel before the end of the decade. See these finger movement diagrams form Weather Sealed if you don't believe me.
  Continue Reading

• Canvi & Temps: An Exploration of Science Over Time

  Posted Dec 15, 2009 to Network Visualization / 2 comments

  

  Bestiario, the group behind 6pli and a number of other network projects, released their most recent project - Canvi & Temps - that explores the complexity of science since the early 1920s.

  The first part, Temps, is two linked charts stacked on top of each other. On top are individual articles and on bottom are tags that provide context to those articles. You'll probably be tempted to read the visualization as a stacked area chart, but that wouldn't quite work. Bar height doesn't really mean anything other than there were more articles or tags in a year when the bars are small. Instead, color indicates count. Roll over an article and see the related tags over time or vice verrsa.

  It reminds me a lot of Bestiario's earlier Atlas of Electromagnetic Space.

  Then there's Canvi, which is a network view of tags and links:

  

  I'm not completely sure what I'm looking at with Canvi. It's more artistic expression than utility, I think. From the Bestiario blog:

  The uniqueness of Canvi lays in the fact that it explores new node positioning techniques as well as their spatial relations. In particular Canvi combines different techniques (geometric paradigms) subtly alternating between nodes and their relation. This means that the representation of the network is in constant movement (a breathing sort of movement), this way offering a broader perception of the local network.

  Yeah, I'm still not sure, but it's nice to look at. Ideas anyone?

  [Thanks, Jose]

• Twitter Mentionmap and Correlations at your.flowingdata

  Posted Dec 11, 2009 to Network Visualization / Add your comment

  

  your.flowingdata got a couple of cool updates recently. One is based on your interactions with others on Twitter and the other helps you find relationships in your actions.

  Twitter Mentionmap

  The first is the Twitter Mentionmap created by Daniel McLaren. It's a network visualization (above) that lets you explore how you (or other Twitter users) interact with others.

  It's not focused on the data that many of you are used to seeing on YFD, but it's always been my plan to bring in other data sources. So when I saw Daniel post the original Mentionmap, I jumped at the chance to get a version for YFD. It seemed like a good first step to branching out. Get it? Network, branching out. Oh nevermind.

  By the way, Daniel used his constellation framework to build this. It's called asterisq. It's worth a look if you're looking to visualize network data. Daniel can also help you with customization and design.
  Continue Reading

• A New Way to Search Images With Google Image Swirl

  Posted Nov 30, 2009 to Network Visualization / 5 comments

  

  There's this branch in computer science and statistics for vision research. Normally, if you ever hear about it in the news it's in the context of spotting terrorists in security tapes or facial recognition checkpoints (you know, like what they have in movies in front of giant steel doors). That is of course not the only application.

  Google (and many others) has been playing around with this stuff for a while. Most recently, they released Google Image Swirl in their labs section, which utilizes computer vision to find similar images.

  Above is my search for happy cat. The initial search result is what you're used to. It's a matrix of thumbnails. Click on one of them, and you'll get similar images clustered as a network graph.

  Google Image Swirl: the new way to find if someone is plagiarizing your work.

  [via information aesthetics]

• The World of Seinfeld

  Posted Sep 2, 2009 to Network Visualization / 13 comments

  

  After yesterday's weirdness, I'm in the mood for something light.

  The show about nothing lasted nine seasons, during which Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine interacted with a whole lot of people. Ricky Linn, a graphic design student, mapped all the relationships over the years.

  Connecting lines are color-coded by type of relationship. It looks like Kramer was more about making friends while Jerry and George were more the dating type. I guess Elaine kept a tighter circle of friends.

• Detailed View of the Kennedy Family Tree

  Posted Aug 24, 2009 to Network Visualization / 4 comments

  

  As far back as I can remember there's always been a mystique around the Kennedy family. It's almost like if you bear the Kennedy name, you're destined for greatness. With the recent passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Patterson Clark of The Washington Post maps out the famous family tree. The tree starts with the marriage of Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald and branches out to current family members and what they do for a living.

  [via DataViz]

• X-Men Universe Relationship Map

  Posted Jul 1, 2009 to Network Visualization / 10 comments

  

  Contrary to what a lot people might think they know from the movies, the X-Men universe stretches out quite a ways with lots of characters and lots of relationships. This super detailed relationship map for all X-Men characters from UncannyXmen shows just that.

  Connections are color-coded to show the type of relationship between a pair of characters. For example, green is a one-sided infatuation, pink is a flirtation by both parties, and a dashed line signifies one of the characters is from an alternative reality. Wolverine sure gets around.

  [via VizWorld]

• Visual Representation of Tabular Information – How to Fix the Uncommunicative Table

  Posted Apr 21, 2009 to Data Design Tips, Network Visualization / 34 comments

  

  This is a guest post by Martin Krzywinski who develops Circos, a GPL-licensed (free) visualization tool that can help you show relationships in data. This article is based on a longer writeup which you can find here.

  Suppose that you are reading an article and the text refers you to a table on the next page. Before you turn the page, what are your expectations of the table? Chances are, you would like it to communicate trends and patterns. Chances are, too, that it will fail and simply deliver numerical minutiae. You are left hunting around the numbers for a while, only to return to the text in hopes that the table's data trends will be communicated elsewhere.
  Continue Reading

• Campaign Contributions to the 110th Congress

  Posted Apr 10, 2009 to Network Visualization / Add your comment

  

  This network graph shows common contributions between representatives in Congress:

  A relationship exists between two elements in the visual if they share a relationship with at least one member of the other group. For instance, both Bernie Sanders and Sam Brownback received campaign contributions from the the National Association of Realtors.

  Line thickness represents number of shared relationships; and color represents Democrat to Democrat, Republican to Republican, and cross-party connections. There's a zoomable version, but like a lot of network stuff it still feels cluttered. I'm sure some node interaction goodness would do this some good.

  [Thanks, @mrflip]

• Phrase Net Shows the Secret Life of Words

  Posted Apr 1, 2009 to Network Visualization / 1 comment

  

  Many Eyes, the social data analysis site, released another visualization tool - Phrase Nets:

  When you read a book it can feel as if you’re encountering a series of hidden networks–characters who talk to each other, ideas that relate to each other. Our new visualization, the Phrase Net, is designed to bring some of these networks to light.

  Upload a body of text and choose connecting words like and or the and the Phrase Net provides a network of words that shows these connections. For example, the above is a Phrase Net for Pride and Prejudice with "and" selected as the connecting phrase. We see a relationships between Jane and Elizabeth, Caterhie and Lydia, and mother and sister. Choose "at" as the connecting word, and you see the places where a lot of things took place:

  

  Interact with the the Phrase Net with zooming and dragging or enter your own connecting phrases. It took me a moment to wrap my head around the concept, but after playing with it a little bit, I'm kind of surprised by the patterns that emerged. Try it out for yourself (below). What do you think?

  [Thanks, Martin]

• Ranking and Mapping Scientific Knowledge – eigenfactor

  Posted Feb 6, 2009 to Network Visualization / 8 comments

  

  The Eigenfactor Project and Moritz Stefaner collaborate in these interactive visualizations "based on Eigenfactor Metrics and hierarchical clustering to explore emerging patterns in citation networks." Yeah... or in other words, this series of four visualizations - radial diagram, stacked, clustering, and network map - explore journal article citations.

  Why you ask? Well the Eigenfactor Project aims to measure the "importance" of journal articles and the metrics are largely based on citation patterns. Here are a few more shots:

  

  

  

  The stacked graph variant and network map are a little slow, but still good. If anything, the collaboration is an excellent example of what you can do with Jeffrey Heer's Flare Visualization Toolkit.

  [Thanks, Moritz and @Edial]

• Data Visualization Sketches for Google Search Results

  Posted Jan 27, 2009 to Network Visualization / 9 comments

  

  Grid/plane, a studio centered in Portland Orgeon, collaborated with Instrument, to visualize media buzz across various social media outlets. The client? Google.

  Working in tandem with Google Analytics, the Flash-based, interactive tools allow users to explore relationships and see the effects of blogs, as well as mainstream and social media over time.

  While this particular project wasn't really focused on Google search results, can you imagine how cool it would be if it were? One day we will get visualization in lieu of listed results. Trust me. We will also have power laces, self-drying jackets, and flying Deloreans. I've seen it with my own eyes.

  Here are a couple more shots:

  

  

  [Thanks, Edial]

• Researchers Map Chaos Inside Cancer Cell

  Posted Dec 29, 2008 to Network Visualization / 4 comments

  

  The thing about cancer cells is that they suck. Their DNA is all screwy. They've got chunks of DNA ripped out and reinserted into different places, which is just plain bad news for the cells in our body that play nice. You know, kind of like life. Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston have compared the DNA of a certain type of breast cancer cell to a normal cell and mapped the differences (and similarities) with the above visualization.

  The graphic summarizes their results. Round the outer ring are shown the 23 chromosomes of the human genome. The lines in blue, in the third ring, show internal rearrangements, in which a stretch of DNA has been moved from one site to another within the same chromosome. The red lines, in the bull's eye, designate switches of DNA from one chromosome to another.

  Some design would benefit the graphic so that your eyes don't bounce around when you look at the technicolor genome but it's interesting nevertheless.

  Check out the Flare Visualization Toolkit or Circos if you're interested in implementing a similar visualization with the above network technique.

  [Thanks, Robert]