Genealogy of Influence Redux: Visualization with Many Eyes

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.

PersonKnowsTotal Influenced (count)Total Influenced By (count)
AlkajiPascal10
AmmoniusSaccasPlotinus22
AmmoniusSaccasOrigen22
AmpereMaxwell12
AnaxagorasPericles30

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.

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2 Responses

  1. 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…

  2. 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…

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