The Journal of Social Structure (JoSS) has posted this year’s Visualization Symposium, and they came to us to see what we’ve been cooking up in our lab.
From their description of the Visualization Symposium: for all beautiful and informative visualizations, we can cite many goopy messes that fail to inform in any meaningful way. As scientists, we can perhaps ignore such poor work, since we can judge the measures calculated to describe the system without the image. Such cases represent merely(!) a lost opportunity for depth and richness.
As one reviewer says: “visualization supercharges the circle graph into a luxuriously information-rich interactive medium. It makes beautiful and effective use of color…”
Depth and richness is exactly what we were hoping to create when we set out to build a simple representation of complex community interactions that anyone could use. Crucial to this exercise was making an information-dense and usable “one-page” diagram that begged to be played with. We think we did it here, and so do the reviewers at JoSS. Stop by and take a look at our radial tree diagram. Kick the tires, take it for a spin, and let us know what you think. Information can be beautiful
