Anyone who’s ever done graph visualization has at one point or another run into the dreaded “Hairball” : Where the sheer number of connections overwhelms the data leading to a giant solid blot of connecting lines, obscuring anything useful. Robert Kosara has a short discussion of the problem and a few solutions to it such as PivotGraph and Parallel Sets.
For a while now, people in visualization have talked about the graph without the graph, i.e., graph visualization without the hairballs. Networks are clearly important and challenging data, and it seems a bit myopic to only look at node-link visualization. Node quilts and the PivotGraph represent promising steps into a very different direction. While they require more work to understand and are more limited in what they can be used for, they are also much directed towards a goal than just showing all of the data. I think that this kind of thinking will lead us to much more interesting techniques in the future than trying to teach the old node-link diagram new tricks.
Visualizing.org has a neat twitter visualization online of 1645 twitter accounts related to information visualization. Taking a short list of seed accounts and then finding all their followers and friends, the result is an impressive (if not a bit crowded) graph visualization. Some edge bundling would have been nice, but you can get a rough idea of the connectivity just from the sheer number of connections.
I’m proud to see @VizWorld on the map as a rather prominent bubble near the upper-right area.
The videosphere project aims to link and visualize the many semantic relationships between video, and has been initially loaded with the TED talks. Computing a “relationship” factor based on the shared tags between videos, the result is a fun interactive space where you can see the many relationships between the videos and find unexpected relationships.
If you’ve ever attempted to render a network graph, then you know that the fine details of colors, layout, connection strategies, and size are more art than science. Requiring constant tweaking and an eye not only for the science but the “beauty” of the result, people frequently stop with ‘good enough’ simply out of frustration. Not any more, thanks to a new tool called ‘Gephi’.
Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.
It looks truly amazing, earning digital urban‘s title of ‘a Photoshop for Graphs’. Interactive refinement and editing, combined with the multitude of options and settings inside Gephi, really do lead to a powerful and beautiful tool. See the demonstration video below.
News is breaking today that Anchor Intelligence, a click-fraud monitoring service, has uncovered a massive 1000+ people ring that managed to bring in at least $3 million. The have some pretty powerful visualizations showing how the ring worked, where you can quite plainly see the interconnected sites in the center.
“We have seen 200 fraud rings,” says Anchor VP Richard Sim, “and this one by far trumps them all. I think it is indicative of how sophisticated the click fraud is getting. We are seeing the sheer scale and size of these rings growing.”
Click fraud occurs when someone sets up a website, signs up with an ad network, and then clicks on the ads to generate ad revenues with false clicks. DormRing1 operated the same way, except it easily involved more than 1,000 people who set up more than 10,000 Websites to spread out the fraud. The image above depicts a portion of the ring, with each red dot representing a source of fraudulent clicks with similar digital signatures.
Chris Davis and Igor Nikolic have visualized the grown of the wiki.tudelft.nl website since it’s inception in 2004 in a variety of ways and shared the results on the wiki.
After using the wiki in our daily work for several years, we realized that we really did not know what it looked like from a higher level. It was clear that clicking from page to page was a completely inadequate way to get a sense of the scale and shape of it. At the same time, in much of our work, we seek to use insights about Complex Systems Theory. By visualizing the wiki, we were able to vividly provide an educational example of a complex system that we were intimately familiar with, and that other university faculty and students could participate in.
The video, shown after the break, reveals a fascinating cellular growth structure as it evolves over time. In addition to that, tho, they have a simple chart of Number of edits per user, reinforcing the 90-9-1 theory, and an interesting coauthorship network.
Just in case Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” has ever confused you, Jeannie Harrell has broken it down for you into an easy-to-understand flow-chart.
Over at Information is Beautiful, David McCandless has created this fantastic chart of all the major time-traveler timelines showing how they might fare against each other. Unfortunately, the Time Lord himself (Doctor Who) was omitted to preserve our sanity, but it’s still a fantastic chart.
David McCandless created this visualization as part of his upcoming book of chart porn, The Visual Miscellaneum. Here, he charts the temporal paths of different TV and movie time travelers (Doctor Who was omitted for the sake of sanity, though he hasn’t ruled out making a separate chart for the Time Lord), and, just for fun, imagines what might happen if time travelers who landed in the same year happened to meet up (I suspect that, despite his ingenuity, Marty McFly would not fare well against the Terminator). McCandless did feel that his research revealed one key deficiency in time travel stories: nearly all time travel journeys he mapped originate and land between the years 1900-2100.
Mashable has compiled a list of 6 great facebook visualizations, primary force-directed graph layouts, that you can check out with your own FaceBook friends and see what mysteries lie underneath the surface.
Like every complex network, Facebook offers unlimited possibilities of visual representation of the various connections between its users. We’ve chosen six beautiful visualizations that will awaken the (visual) geek within you.
You don’t have to stop at merely watching. Some of the visualizations on the list come with tools that you can use to create beautiful Facebook visualizations of your own with very little effort. Enjoy!
A new website, Diseasome, visualizes 516 diseases and 903 genes to show common backgrounds and effects. The result is an interactive map showing how groups of diseases, say Cancer, share a common background and genetic material but manifest in slightly different ways. There is also a wealth of information about how they did it:
Nodes are positioned on the map according to a topological placement algorithm, i.e. each node is positioned solely according to its linking pattern. Many softwares are available for doing this. Gephi has been chosen for its high quality algorithm ForceAtlas.
Many algorithms make possible for a 2D rendering of an adjacent matrix – i.e. the matrix describing any graph. We used a ForceAtlas algorithm, which shares with all the others the same basic principle: minimizing the system’s energy while maximizing the use of the space available for the representation of the data. To minimize the system’s energy, one can for instance assume that nodes that are not linked to each other are pushing away from each other whereas nodes that are linked to each other are attracting each other. Through iterative steps the algorithm tries to find a way to position nodes where there is as little link overlap as possible. To maximize the use of the mapped space, the graph is spread as much as possible over the surface allocated for its display.
You can view the map at their site, http://diseasome.eu/, as well as buy a Poster or the Book.
Anyone who’s ever done graph visualization has at one point or another run into the dreaded “Hairball” : Where the sheer number of connections overwhelms the data leading to a giant solid blot of connecting lines, obscuring anything useful. Robert Kosara has a short discussion of the problem and a few solutions to it such as PivotGraph and Parallel Sets.
The videosphere project aims to link and visualize the many semantic relationships between video, and has been initially loaded with the TED talks. Computing a “relationship” factor based on the shared tags between videos, the result is a fun interactive space where you can see the many relationships between the videos and find unexpected relationships.
If you’ve ever attempted to render a network graph, then you know that the fine details of colors, layout, connection strategies, and size are more art than science. Requiring constant tweaking and an eye not only for the science but the “beauty” of the result, people frequently stop with ‘good enough’ simply out of frustration. Not any more, thanks to a new tool called ‘Gephi’.
News is breaking today that Anchor Intelligence, a click-fraud monitoring service, has uncovered a massive 1000+ people ring that managed to bring in at least $3 million. The have some pretty powerful visualizations showing how the ring worked, where you can quite plainly see the interconnected sites in the center.
Chris Davis and Igor Nikolic have visualized the grown of the wiki.tudelft.nl website since it’s inception in 2004 in a variety of ways and shared the results on the wiki.
Over at Information is Beautiful, David McCandless has created this fantastic chart of all the major time-traveler timelines showing how they might fare against each other. Unfortunately, the Time Lord himself (Doctor Who) was omitted to preserve our sanity, but it’s still a fantastic chart.
Mashable has compiled a list of 6 great facebook visualizations, primary force-directed graph layouts, that you can check out with your own FaceBook friends and see what mysteries lie underneath the surface.
VizWorld.com 
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