Eric Blue's Blog: 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
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6QIEzkheOE2-
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
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6XIUr1qeOE2-
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
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6eI-caxeOE2-
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.

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