Genealogy of Influence Redux: Visualization with Many Eyes

The other day I posted about an intriguing project by Mike Love called The Genealogy of Influence.  You can check out his blog here.  Since I also recently blogged about the Many Eyes project by IBM, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could take Mike’s original data and upload for visualization.
 I took the source GraphML file here, and *very* quickly parsed it to generate a tab-delimited file.  I simply parsed each EDGE entry using Perl and created a hash for each person.  This hash listed the individuals that person influenced, the people they were influenced by, and a tally for each of those data sets.  This data is obviously not normalized since I planned to try out a few different visualization types using the same source data.
 e.g.
| Person | Knows | Total Influenced (count) | Total Influenced By (count) | 
| Alkaji | Pascal | 1 | 0 | 
| AmmoniusSaccas | Plotinus | 2 | 2 | 
| AmmoniusSaccas | Origen | 2 | 2 | 
| Ampere | Maxwell | 1 | 2 | 
| Anaxagoras | Pericles | 3 | 0 | 
The upload data set was posted here.
 Here are some of the visualization types I experimented with.
 Network Diagram
 This is somewhat similar to the graph on the Geneaology of Influence site.  However, it’s not a directed graph, and it’s not interactive like TouchGraph.
 
 Treemap
 I think the treemap is probably the most interesting alternative to the network/graph diagram.  You can easily switch between the people that were most influential, and also who had the most influences.
 
 Bubble Chart
 I tried this last visualization method just for kicks.  The bubble chart isn’t the most effective visualization, but it does allow you to easily see influence by bubble size.
 
2 Responses
Semantic Wikis and Faceted Browsing: The Ultimate Knowledge Database
Every 6 months or so I mix things up and alternate my primary area of focus between studying philosophy and pursuing my creative technical interests (e.g. my multitude of pet/geek projects). I decided to switched gears a couple weeks ago…
Semantic Wikis and Faceted Browsing: The Ultimate Knowledge Database
Every 6 months or so I mix things up and alternate my primary area of focus between studying philosophy and pursuing my creative technical interests (e.g. my multitude of pet/geek projects). I decided to switched gears a couple weeks ago…