Tag Archives: graph layout

Sociograph 2.0

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An idea that has been brewing for some time…

http://apps.facebook.com/sociograph/

The 1.0 version was clunky, in Java, and relied on me racking my brain to figure out how everybody I knew was connected and entering the data manually. Day after day I would add to the dataset, until I finally realized that I was becoming obsessive and I had to stop, as the job was neverending. If we were even acquainted in 2002 you are probably in there…

http://forresto.com/oldsite/interactive/sociograph/sociograph.html

But now it is 2008 and we have fun things like APIs to play with. The only data that I can get to easily to connect people is groups, but I would like this to have more connections graphed. The connections are shallower than my hand-coded graph, but infinitely broader.

I need 5 people to add it in order to release it into the wild, so if you think it is at all neat please do. All suggestions welcome, of course.

Flare: Flash data visualization toolkit

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My interest in data visualization can be mapped in this order:

  1. Java Graph Layout demo — a small applet
    • I played with making cubes and snowflakes with the simple notation for adding nodes and edges
  2. Touchgraph — added navigation and metadata, xml datasets
    • undertook a project to connect everybody that I knew by how they knew each other called Sociograph (had to stop adding nodes after a while, was getting obsessed)
  3. Prefuse — improved on these concepts aesthetically, and added many new visualizations
    • almost inspired to learn Java, but never really dove into it
  4. SpringGraph — Graph layout concepts in Flex
    • created TagGraph with this and the Flickr API, which creates an almost limitless web of photos and tags in an easily explorable interface
  5. Flare — some of prefuse ported to ActionScript