This image was after a week of low-intensity computer use. Not that surprising to see Google, Facebook and Twitter as very central nodes, tho still impressive to have an image of how many sites report to them. Some sites like quantserve.com I’d at least heard of before, but not some of the other central stats players like 2o7.net or media6degrees.com or imrworldwide.com that appeared lurking in the network.

The visualization seems to be built in SVG using the D3 library’s network code. The interactivity and design are quite lovely, at least for small networks. However, now that I’ve been running Collusion for a month, the graph is quite large and the animation is getting painfully slow and eating my CPU.

The folks at the New York Times continue to produce awesome data visualisations for their stories. Recently they’ve been splitting production to produce both print (above) and online interactive versions (below) of their figures. This is great, because it makes it possible to design for the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. The interactive version of the the Overview of the Euro Debt Crises viz is also really nice because the the column on the left allows selective hi-lighting of different elments of the network corresponding to various parts of the narrative. And its all in SVG! (via Ronald Rice)

I’ve been working for the past several months to build AngelsOfTheRight.net a new interactive version of the conservative philanthropy network data from the Media Matters Conservative Transparency Project and other sources. The idea is to have an atlas where you can dive in, explore, and see which organisations have similar patterns of funding relationships. As always, my hope is to make some of these invisible economic and power relationships a bit more tangible.


The image above is a screen shot of the site, zoomed in with the Heritage Foundation (a very central conservative think tank) selected, with its links to its funding institutions highlighted in purple.

Another goal of the project is to really push the limits of what we can do with network maps in HTML5. This project was built using the NodeViz project , written mostly by Greg Michalec with some help from me, which wraps up a bunch of the functionality needed to squeeze network ties out of a database, through Graphviz, and into a browser with features like zooming, panning, and full DOM and JavaScript interaction with the rest of the page content. This means that we can do fun things like have an tour to mode a viewer through the map, and have list views of related data alongside the map that will open and focus on related nodes when clicked. It is also supposed to degrade gracefully to just display a clickable image on non-SVG browsers like Internet Explorer 7 and 8. But somehow we broke that part, hope to fix it soon. (fixed, thx greg)

I talk a bit more about the data, its weaknesses, and what sorts of structures I see after countless hours gazing deeply network in the Observation and Discussion content on the site. Please do add suggestions, bugs, and feedback about the project by commenting on this post. The “1.0″ version of the Angels of the right is still here