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