visualcomplexity.com

Networkism

There's an undeniable aesthetic quality to many network visualizations featured on VC, but what's interesting is to notice how the allure of intertwined complexity is contaminating many artists from more traditional realms (painting in particular) in what seems to be the emergence of a new artistic trend or movement. You can either call it Complexism or Networkism, but regardless of the name, this influence is clearly visible in the works of Sharon Molloy, Emma McNally, Janice Caswell, to name a few, where imaginary landscapes of interconnected entities are the prevailing theme.

Shown here is the work of artist/designer Tatiana Plakhova, an "abstract variety of linked dots union in empty space or deep in the water". Made in Adobe Illustrator, these compositions clearly embody many of the characteristics of this artistic movement, pulling us in through the intriguing appeal of network visualization.

Concurrency and Reachability: Transmission in a dynamic network

These images are part of a five minute movie representing an infection spreading through a transmission network over time. The data comes from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. The animation uses a new method of network analysis to demonstrate that small differences in reported behavior can potentially explain the large racial disparities in HIV infection observed in the United States.

Circles are women, squares are men. Grey and white coloring are indicative of race. Active partners are indicated with a grey line and people move closer to the person they are partnered with. Concurrency is defined by a person having more than one partnership at a time. The dynamic network simulates the partnerships that happened over a 10 year period in a population of 10,000 young adults, but for this experiment the authors focused on the 600 or so individuals that could eventually become infected. The animation starts with 10 infected individuals chosen at random and quickly builds up a network of ties. When a partnership forms between an infected and an uninfected node, transmission is possible, so this partnership is added to what the authors call the reachable path. These transmitting ties are then kept in the animation to show how the reachable path grows over time. Blue ties mean that when the relationship started both partners were monogamous, while red ties indicate that one or both partners had a concurrent partnership.

The Network Modeling Group also includes Mark S. Handcock, David Hunter, Carter Butts, Steve Goodreau. The animation was produced by Skye Bender-deMoll.

subblue

Ex-physicist Tom Beddard showcases in his website many interesting mathematical and generative graphics that are inventive and inspirational. Among the works, his experiments in Fractal Art seem to be the more engaging ones.

Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization

Graphs depicted as node-link diagrams are widely used to show relationships between entities. However, node-link diagrams comprised of a large number of nodes and edges often suffer from visual clutter. The use of edge bundling remedies this and reveals high-level edge patterns. Previous methods require the graph to contain a hierarchy for this, or they construct a control mesh to guide the edge bundling process, which often results in bundles that show considerable variation in curvature along the overall bundle direction. In a paper presented at Eurographics' Symposium on Visualization 2009, Danny Holten and Jarke J. van Wijk introduced a new edge bundling method that uses a self-organizing approach to bundling, in which edges are modeled as ?exible springs that can attract each other, has been introduced. In contrast to previous methods, no hierarchy or control mesh is used. The resulting bundled graphs show signi?cant clutter reduction and clearly visible high-level edge patterns. Curvature variation is furthermore minimized, resulting in smooth bundles that are easy to follow. The authors have also introduced a rendering technique that can be used to emphasize the bundling.

IMITATE+INFORMATE

Imitate and Informate is an initiative that aims at transforming formal aspects of natural phenomena into data visualization methods. Noticeably inspired by Nature, the authors initially asked themselves a series of questions: "Do our graphical systems reveal other information than classical statistics?", "Do they distract from data?", "How much graphical uninformation is allowed for the sake of a certain visual style?".

By applying a variety of computational and generative strategies for managing data, they were able to produce a series of experimental visualizations that are extremely inspiring, and strangely familiar. Nature is a great teacher when it comes to managing complexity in a simple, efficient way, providing great clues to many challenges surfacing in the field of Information Visualization.

The project was part of the course "Reality in Virtuality", at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, with Prof. Danijela Djokic.

(Gen)erative Scapes

The work of Portuguese Generative Architect Paulo Guerreiro is both fresh, innovative and inspiring. Showcased in his blog (Gen)erative Scapes are a series of experiments in Generative Architecture that deliver a bright voice in a field saturated by orthogonality and predictability. Code is a great source of creativity.

Random Walk

Random Walk presents a series of experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness. The project simulates randomness in a series of visualizations, covering 14 double-sided A2 posters, aiming at delivering insights into the unfamiliar phenomenon. The project was part of a diploma thesis at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, and was supervised by Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen.

AlloSphere

Visualizing, hearing and exploring complex multi-dimensional data provides insight that is essential for progress in a number of critical areas of science and engineering, where the amount and complexity of the data overwhelm traditional computing environments. The need for richer and more compelling visualizations continues to receive attention from many practitioners and institutions.

To face some of these contemporary demands, composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and her team have been working on one of the largest scientific and artistic instruments in the world. Based at UCSB, the AlloSphere is a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a 3-story near-to-anechoic (echo free) cube that allows for synthesis, manipulation, exploration and analysis of large-scale data sets in an environment that can simulate virtually real sensorial perception. It is a physical place designed to facilitate creativity and incubate ideas via collaboration. Researchers find a multitude of interactive interfaces for research into: scientific visualization, numerical simulations, data mining, visual/aural abstract data representations, knowledge discovery, systems integration, human perception, and many other areas of inquiry. Although originally planned in 2001, the AlloSphere was only physically completed in February of 2007.

Scientifically, it is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture: abstract, higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media.

Artistically, the AlloSphere is an instrument for the creation and performance of avant-garde new works and the development of entirely new modes and genres of expression and forms of immersion-based entertainment, fusing future art, architecture, music, media, games, cinema, and more.

You can see composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demoing some of AlloSphere's features at TED.

Web Trend Map v4.0

In 2007 the strategic design agency Information Architects (iA), based in Tokyo, Japan, launched their first Web Trend Map (of a future series of 4). Although they were candid enough with their first version, stating that it was "totally unscientific and almost useless, but definitely fun to look at", they ended up realizing the popularity of the project. What started as a playful Christmas gift for their clients, quickly became an expected yearly publication by iA, with the authors becoming more serious and laborious with each new iteration. This yearly publication maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people onto a series of alternated versions of the Tokyo Metro map.

Shown here is the fourth version of the Web Trend Map, released in April 2009, and revealing a considerable graphical departure from previous versions. You can see them all side-by-side on this blog post.

Air Lines

Air Lines is a project that aims at mapping worldwide airline routes. Every single scheduled flight on any given day is represented by a fine line from its point of origin to the airport of destination, therefore forming a net of thousands of lines. Hubs like JFK, FRA or DXB turn into heavy condensed nodes where lines meet, while local routes are only slightly discernible.

The outcome is a large 46" wide poster with pinpoint fine detail. Every scheduled airline route has been extracted from booking and airline systems. As the author explains: "It took several months to gather all the information and program the software algorithm that interprets inputs like LHRDXBSIN3242AD into vector files".

The Remotest place on Earth

On April 18th 2009, the New Scientist published an article on a remarkable project developed by researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. The authors combined a series of maps to create a new map of connectedness showing the most interconnected and remote places on earth.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.

The maps were created to show how the distribution of people affects their access to resources such as education and medical care, and how we are increasingly pushing wildlife out of even the wildest corners of our planet.

The first image shows the final map of connectedness while the second image shows a zoomed view over the world's most remote place: the Tibetan plateau. From here, says Andy Nelson, a former researcher at the European Commission, it is a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla - one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot. Rough terrain and an altitude of 5200 metres make this the most secluded place on earth.

GeoDome

GeoDome is an outstanding visual analysis technology by The Elumenati. It enables audiences to interactively navigate through beautifully rendered visualizations of scientific data, working collaboratively. By immersively presenting complex concepts in an easy-to-understand visual context, it provides transformative experiences for learners of all ages.

When in Asheville to attend HATCH in mid-April 2009, I had the chance to see one of the portable immersive domes up-close (or from within to be more precise) and I must say it was a unique and stimulating experience. Anyone passionate about Data Visualization would be fired up by witnessing the capabilities of the system and wonder on its future developments. Used mostly as an educational tool, the technology has a massive potential and can incorporate a variety of geo-based datasets. Producing mesmerizing flythroughs across Earth and the Cosmos, in a series of interactive Powers of Ten, it has been used for a variety of clients, including Nasa, NOAA, American Museum of Natural History, Cirque du Soleil, amongst others.

The Interactorium

Part of the New South Wales Systems Biology Initiative, the Interactorium is a platform built to visualize very large interactome datasets. It was developed in collaboration with the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, and adapted from the Skyrails Visualisation Engine, originally developed by Yose Widjaja and previously featured on VC.

The Interactorium works as an atlas of known protein-protein interactions, responsible for inumerous biological functions and of central importance for virtually every process in a living cell. The current distribution uses the yeast protein-protein interaction dataset by Bertin et al.

On the project's site you can see a video of the visualization engine, or download it and run the application locally.

Blue Brain Project (Videos)

This is the third entry on VC [1, 2] for the remarkable research effort by IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, entitled Blue Brain Project.

On January 2007 they released 3 videos showing a simulated animation through a cortex's neuronal network. The cortex, the convoluted "grey matter" that makes up 80% of the human brain, is responsible for our ability to remember, think, reflect, empathize, communicate, adapt to new situations and plan for the future. The cortex first appeared in mammals, and it has a fundamentally simple repetitive structure that is the same across all mammalian species. This structure lends itself to a systematic modeling approach. And indeed, the first step of the Blue Brain project is to re-create this fundamental microcircuit, down to the level of biologically accurate individual neurons. This microcircuit can then be used in simulations like the one shown here.

5 years Designerlist

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the design mailing list at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany, Matthias Dittrich, an interaction design student at the institution, developed a series of visualizations of the current email dataset. The aim of the work was to show when, and how fast were emails being replied. All emails of a particular weekday were shown in a 24-hour time strip. The replied emails are represented by an arc linking to the original email source. Shown here are snapshots of two different days analyzed in the study.

Synchronous Objects

This is a remarkably original and impressive project. It not only exposes a detailed quasi-scientific approach to the art of dance, but it also emphasizes the benefits of data visualization in the understanding of a fundamental form of human expression.

A joint project of choreographer William Forsythe and Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance, Synchronous Objects is an extensive and unique resource. This project aims to create a large set of data visualization tools for understanding and analyzing the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of William Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (2000). These systems were quantified through the collection of data and transformed into a series of objects - synchronous objects - that work in harmony to explore those choreographic structures, reveal their patterns, and re-imagine what else they might look like. As the authors explain: "Our goal in creating these objects is to engage a broad public, explore cross-disciplinary research, and spur creative discovery for specialists and non-specialists alike."

The images shown here are from a section called Cue Annotations, aiming at visualizing how dancers give and receive visual cues to and from each other. A cue is an indication that one or more dancers can initiative a specified movement phrase. You can watch an explanatory video or watch four annotated videos (with dancers and annotations).

There is a lot to digest on the site, and in the beginning, the amount of (great) content can be a bit overwhelming. But it's certainly worth every minute. You can see a video about the project, featuring interviews with the authors, and the project's photo gallery.

Narratives 2.0

Matthias Dittrich is an interaction design student at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany. In his website he showcases a variety of fresh and promising work, accessed through a dynamic interface. Shown here are images from his "Narrative 2.0" project, a series of music track visualizations from different artists, such as Queen, The Chemical Brothers, Moloko and Beethoven.

As Matthias explains: "Narrative 2.0 visualises music. The different music tracks were segmented into single channels. These channels are shown in a fanlike structure where lines move away from the centre with the flow of time. The angle of the line changes according to the volume, and when reaching a higher level, the channel becomes highlighted in orange. The visualisation does not necessarily return exact information, however, the order and uniformity of the song can still be perceived."

Image 1 is a visualization of "Familiar Feelings" by Moloko, while image 2 shows "Apache" by Ennio Morricone.

NodeXL

NodeXL is a network overview, discovery, and exploration add-in for Excel 2007. The tool allows for a quick, alternative way to visualize directed graphs and social networks within Excel. It provides several network metrics and manipulation features which can serve as an important testing tool for many Social Network Analysis (SNA) enthusiasts. Networks can also be directly imported from Twitter and personal email.

Emma McNally's drawings

The work of Emma McNally is another great case of an artistic embracement of Complexity and Systems Theory, resulting in a slow detachment of these domains from their exclusive scientific realm. It's quite remarkable when this adoption takes the shape of randomized algorithms in Generative Art, but it's even more astounding when it's expressed by means of hand-drawn illustrations.

The stunning graphite illustrations of Emma McNally convey a sort of cartographic conjecture, with imaginary planes and connections, intersecting squares, circles and dots. These abstract lines, shapes, and patterns make for some striking textures and resemble classic mappings of cyberspace through nodal connections of imagined networks.

You can see all her drawings on her flickr slideshow.

1hr in front of the TV

This is a simple, curious and imaginative experiment. On Christmas 2006, bumblebee (flickr name) decided to build a visual summary of his son, daughter and cat's movements in their living room over a period of an hour.

To have an accurate understanding of their paths in space he used a marked-out equally-spaced grid in masking tape and then filmed the protagonists moving across the grid for one hour. He then reviewed the video and plotted their movements on each minute of the video's timecode onto a 'room map' with corresponsing grid.

3D Dewey Data Visualization

Wanting to explore a variety of topics, such as 3D Space, particle systems, OpenGL, Java, alpha blending, bill boarding, user interactivity, self-organizing algorithms, and electromagnetic attractions & repulsion, Syed Reza Ali produced another experimental visualization on Library record data.

Syed used one year's (2008) transaction data (books, DVDs, etc) from the Seattle Public Library to drive this visualization. Each particle/sphere is given properties, pertaining to each category/subcategory of the Dewey system it represents and the amount of checked out items in that category. This allows users to quickly view all the categories in a 3D space and differentiate which category had more traffic for the specific month and what sub-category was most popular. The visualization could also accommodate automatic updating to show popularity throughout the day at the library. A physics system is used to separate the nodes evenly on the surface of the sphere (via electromagnetic repulsion), while a specific algorithm clusters the category-related nodes together.

Social Collider

The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet's promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn't resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

You can read more about the project here.

Paris Metro by Harry Beck

The significance of Harry Beck's map design of 1933 is widely recognized as one of the seminal works in Graphic and Information Design, and a major influence to all subsequent underground maps of the world. It's only when you see it next to its predecessor diagram from 1932, with its convoluted geo-based arrangement, that the brilliance of Beck's design really comes to life, in a diagram that is as fresh and original as if it had been created today.

Many people are probably not aware that Harry Beck's prowess did not remain within the UK. In fact, in 1951 he would submit a revised edition of a map he had worked on for the Paris Metro in the late 1930s. This map was eventually rejected by the Metro administration and would end up being largely forgotten. On March 2009, Mark Ovenden - author of Transit Maps of the World - made a great post on the Creative Review Blog, describing this important episode in modern cartographic history.

If one wants to see this map up-close, the best place to go is the London Transport Museum - a treasure trove to London Underground aficionados.