The Process of Creating Data Visualizations

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jun 30, 2012 at 07:42 AM

I worship Tufte :-)

More on data visualisations; I expect some people here will find the following interesting:

Graphing the history of philosophy
http://drunks-and-lampposts.com/2012/06/13/graphing-the-history-of-philosophy/

“Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. The node and text are sized according to the number of connections. The algorithm that visualises the graph also tends to put the better connected nodes in the centre of the diagram so we the most influential philosophers, in large text, clustered in the centre. It all seems about right with the major figures in the western philosophical tradition taking the centre stage. (I need to also add the direction of influence with a arrow head ? something I?ve not got round to yet.) A shortcoming however is that this evaluation only takes into account direct lines of influence. Indirect influence via another person in the network does not enter into it. This probably explains why Descartes is smaller than you?d think.”
(And Plato I would add :-)

Sideline: I encourage people here wanting to connect and engage more on “extracurricular” subjects (i.e. non-outliner-software and non-personal-productivity) to try out Google Plus, if you haven’t done so already. Of the social networks I believe it offers the best added value, both in terms of functionality and members.

You can find my profile via http://gplus.to/adeliyannis