Visual complexity – a visual exploration on mapping complex networks. (Manuel Lima)

MFA Thesis – Blogviz – mapping the dynamics of information diffusion in blogspace.

VisualComplexity.com – a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.

Over 460 projects in it. Vehr good!

Networks are everywhere

• (cf powers of 10)
• brain, nerves, cells, molecules, societies, food-webs, ecosystems, internet, power grids, transporation systems – all can be represented as networks.

Infoviz: data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom transition understanding

Infovis growing a lot as a field.

“making visible the invisible” “visual simplicity for conceptual complexity” “a comprehensive repository of complex network visualizations”

we’re still learning how to visualize information – it’s not something we’ve found the right answer to yet.

Infoviz aids us to filter information

Things that are popular on infoviz:

Knowledge networks dominate, social networks and WWW high (41% of all projects between them)... Biology is very, very high.

Examples back to 1780 (ghost map?)

05/06 dominate

top 10 popular keywords: music, flash, flickr, tree, time, network, del.icio.us, map, timeline, brain

structural commonality

• mouse neuronal network compared to “millenium simulation” of cosmos. very similar – but is this worthwhile.
• neuron compared to OSM traces of London (nice)
• mapping avatars in “Quest Atlantis” mapping how avatars move in space, compared to “GPS Drawing”, people making drawings out of GPS traces.

VC Trends

• visualising del.icio.us tags
• mapping terrorism
  • social networks that are very hard to track
• visualizing wikipedia
• maping blogspace
• visualizing gps
• exploring enron’s email dataset
• trees of life.

Visualization methods

• all tracked on VC

Strength of interactivity: