writing | ben fry » networks http://benfry.com/writing Visualizing Data Sat, 05 Nov 2011 18:57:27 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 What this interminable conflict needs is a *mind map* http://benfry.com/writing/archives/637 http://benfry.com/writing/archives/637#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:19:56 +0000 admin http://benfry.com/writing/?p=637 worse than boehner's health care diagram

What’s that?

It’s actually a map of counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan?

Oh.

]]> http://benfry.com/writing/archives/637/feed 0 Learning from Lombardi http://benfry.com/writing/archives/545 http://benfry.com/writing/archives/545#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:35:02 +0000 admin http://benfry.com/writing/?p=545 Just posted an essay about the work of artist Mark Lombardi that I presented at Experimenta Design in Lisbon last week. I don’t usually post lectures, but this is a kind of work-in-progress that I’m trying to sort out for myself.

it takes a very steady haaaaand

For the panel, we were to choose “an individual, movement, technology, whatever – whose importance has been overlooked” and follow that with “two themes that [we] believe will define the future of design and architecture.” In that context, I chose Lombardi’s work, and how it highlights a number of themes that are important to the future of design, particularly in working with data.

]]> http://benfry.com/writing/archives/545/feed 0 15 Views of a Node Link Graph http://benfry.com/writing/archives/394 http://benfry.com/writing/archives/394#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 01:27:30 +0000 admin http://benfry.com/writing/?p=394 Depicting networks (also known as graphs, and covered in chapters 7 and 8 of Visualizing Data) is a tricky subject, and too often leads to representations that are a tangled and complicated mess. Such diagrams are often referred to with terms like ball of yarn or string, a birds nest, cat hair or simply hairball.

It’s also common for a network diagram to be engaging and attractive for its complexity (usually aided and abetted by color), which tends to hide how poorly it conveys the meaning of the data it represents.

On the other hand, Tamara Munzner is someone in visualization who really “gets” graphs in greater depth. A couple years ago she gave an excellent Google Tech Talk (looks like it was originally from another conference in ‘05), titled “15 Views of a Node Link Graph” (video, links, slides) where she discussed a range of methods for working viewing graph data, along with their pros and cons:

A cheat sheet of the 15 methods:

  1. Edge List
  2. Hand-Drawn
  3. Dot
  4. Force-Directed Placement
  5. TopoLayout
  6. Animated Radial Layouts
  7. Constellation
  8. Treemaps
  9. Cushion Treemaps
  10. Themescapes
  11. Multilevel Call Matrices
  12. SpaceTree
  13. 2D Hyperbolic Trees
  14. H3
  15. TreeJuxtaposer

The presentation is an excellent survey of methods, and highly recommended for anyone getting started with graph and network data. It’s useful food for thought for the “how should I represent this data?” question.

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