The Vizosphere from Flowing Data:
From the post:
There are lots of people on Twitter who talk visualization. Moritz Stefaner had some fun with Gephi for a view of a whole lot of those people. He calls it the Vizosphere.
This map shows 1645 twitter accounts related to the topic of information visualization. The accounts were determined as follows: For a subjective selection of “seed accounts”, the twitter API was queried for followers and friends. In order to be included into the map, a user account needed to have at least 5 links (i.e. follow or being followed) to one of these accounts. The size of the network nodes indicates the number of followers within this network.
Interesting visualization but it occurs to me that visualizing relationships, on Twitter or elsewhere, is like drawing out a family tree. Interesting for a while but only for a while.
But then I wonder what would make such a visualization more interesting/useful?
Some possibilities:
- What are the directions of the who followed who relationships?
- What are the directions of retweeting in the relationships?
And beyond the world of Twitter:
- Geographic locations of the users.
- (Other dimension of your choice)
The visualization by Moritz demonstrates an interesting technique.
My concern is that we may not ask what’s missing in a visualization?