CityReads│Visualizing complexity

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Visualizing complexity

When everything is visualized…

Manuel Lima, 2011. Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, Princeton Architectural Press.

Sources: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/book/

http://www.eyemagazine.com/review/article/networks-map-a-complex-world

https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/08/31/visual-complexity-book/

VisualComplexity.com, founded by Manuel Lima in 2005, is a repository of experimental visual mapping of complex networks. Among the many projects indexed there (more than 770 at the time of writing), the website displays a wide variety of visualizations across fields such as biology, physics, ecology, computer science, sociology, news and government data. Examples include the relationship between scientific disciplines; GPS co-ordinates and the speed of taxis; internet connectivity; terrorist affiliations; and a wide variety of other applications.

This vast repository—frequently referred to as a “map of maps” and depicting an assortment of systems in subject areas as diverse as biology, social networks, and the World Wide Web—is the most complete and accessible chart of the field’s landscape. Some projects are rich interactive applications that go beyond the computer screen and livein large-scale multisensorial installations; others are static, meant to be experienced in print media like posters and printouts. Some require hours of rendering and complex algorithms to produce; others are simply drafted by handor use a specific drawing software. Although VisualComplexity.com has grown to over seven hundred projects, the goal remains the same: to facilitate acritical understanding of different network-visualization methods across the widest spectrum of knowledge.

Lima distils lessons from this enormous Web-based project, establishes themes, principles and best practice, and publishes a book,  Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information. In this book, Manuel Lima collects and presents almost three hundred of the most compelling examples of information design — everything from representing networks of followers on Twitter and the eighty-five recorded covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” todepicting interconnections between members of the Al Queda network and interactions among proteins in a human cell. Lima also looks at the long tradition of mapping complex networks, offering the first book to integrate athorough history of network vizualization with an examination of the real-lifesituations from which these graphics are generated.

In the foreword, Lev Manovich explains that information visualization and networks science are ‘two key techno-cultural phenomena of our time’. These fast-moving fields facilitate the perception of structure and dynamics in complex systems. Both network science and information visualization hold the potential to address communication problems in the face of ever-increasing complexity, and Lima does an admirable job of documenting this emerging field of practice.

Organization of this book

Lima argues that the network is a truly ubiquitous structure present in most natural and artificial systems you canthink of, from power grids to proteins, the internet, and the brain. Usually depicted by network diagrams made of nodes (a person, website, neuron, protein,or airport) and lines that connect and highlight relationships between the nodes (friendship, chemical exchange, or information flow), networks are an inherent fabric of life and a growing object of study in various scientific domains.

The book opens with “Tree of Life,” an exploration of the sacred meaning of trees and their widespread use as a classification system over the centuries. It showcases an assortment of ancient representations—as predecessors of modern-day network diagrams—where the tree metaphor is used to visually convey a variety of topics, from theological events to an encyclopedia’s table of contents.

The porphyrian tree, the oldest known type of a classificatory tree diagram

The second chapter, “From Trees to Networks,” makes the case for a new network-based outlook on the world, one that is based on diversity, decentralization, and nonlinearity. It explores several instances—from the way we envision our cities to the way we organize information and decode our brain—where an alternative network model is replacing the hierarchical tree schema.

Chapter three, “Decoding Networks,”delves into the science behind network thinking and network drawing, providinga short introduction to its main precursors and early milestones. It also takes a pragmatic and utilitarian look at network visualization, acknowledging its key functions and proposing a set of guiding principles aimed at improvingexisting methods and techniques.

Chapter four, “Infinite Interconnectedness,” presents a large number of examples divided into fourteen popular subjects.From depictions of the blogo sphere to representations of terrorist networks, chapter four highlights the truly complex connectedness of modern times.

Chapter five, “The Syntax of a New Language,” organizes a vast array of projects by their shared visual layouts and configurations. As designers, scientists, and researchers across the globe portray an increasing number of network structures in innovative ways, their collective effort forms the building blocks of a new network visualization lexicon.

Chapter six, “Complex Beauty,” examines the alluring nature of networks, responsible for a considerable shift in ourculture and society. Alternating between scientific and artistic viewpoints, this chapter explores the divide between order and complexity before culminating in a discussion of an original art movement embracing the newly discovered beauty of the network scheme.

Finally, and in the spirit of network diversity and decentralization, “Looking Ahead,” the last chapter, presents different views on the influential growth of visualization, according to renowned experts, active participants, and attentive observers. The featured essays cover an array of trends and technologies shaping the progress of visualization and provide an immensely captivating perspective on what may lie ahead.

By exploring different facets of our information driven network culture, this book ultimately unifies two rising disciplines: network science and information visualization. While network science examines the interconnections of various natural and artificial systemsin areas as diverse as physics, genetics, sociology, and urban planning, information visualization aims at visually translating large volumes of data into digestible insights, creating an explicit bridge between data and knowledge.

Amazing visualizations from the book

Fromthe Bible to Wikipedia edits to the human genome, the gorgeous and thought-provoking visualizations in the book will make you look at the world ina whole new way, and the insightful essays accompanying them will vastly expand your understanding of the trends and technologies shaping our ever-evolving relationship with information.

The tree of the Two Advents

Joachim of Fiore, Liber figurarum, 1202

This remarkable figure presents the main characters and institutions of the Christian salvation history. From bottom to top: Adam, Jacob the Patriarch, Ozias the Prophet, and Jesus Christ (repeated twice). The figure of Christ dominates the center of the genealogical tree (representing the first coming, or Redemption), as well as the very top (the place of thesecond coming, or Resurrection). The lower branches, originating from the figure of Jacob the Patriarch, correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel, and the top branches, radiating from the image of Jesus Christ, symbolize the twelve Christian churches.

Brain and Body

Alesha Sivartha, The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man, 1912

Density Design: Mario Porpora

The Poverty Red Thread, 2008

A map of the poverty line in Italy organized according to family typologies (number of family members), and further categorized by location (thenorth, center, or south of Italy).

Martin Krzywinski

 Circos, 2005

A visualization of chromosomal relationships within one genome.

Stefanie Posavec
Writing Without Words, 2008

A chart of the structure of part one of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road(1957). Each splitting of the branch into progressively smaller sections parallels the organization of the content from chapters to paragraphs, sentences, and words. Each color relates to one of eleven thematic categories created by Posavec for the book (e.g., travel, work and survival, sketches of regional life).

Christoper Paul Baker
Email Map, 2007

A rendering of the relationships between Baker and individuals in his address book generated by examining the to, from, and cc fields of every email in his in-box archive.

Chris Harrison
Visualizing the Bible, 2007

A map of the 63,779 cross-references found in the Bible. The bargraph on the bottom represents all of the books in the Bible, alternating between white and light gray for easy differentiation. The length of each bar, representative of a book’s chapter and dropping below the datum, corresponds to the number of verses in that chapter. Each arc represents a textual cross-reference(e.g., place, person), and the color denotes the distance between the two chapters where the reference appears — ultimately creating a rainbowlike effect.

By the way, the cover of this book shows Borris Muller’s visualization of the 35,558 words in Lima’s book.

P.S. Lima published his second book, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, in 2014 by Princeton Architectural Press, covers over 800 years of human culture through the lens of the tree figure, from its entrenched roots in religious medieval exegesis to its contemporary, secular digital themes. And Lima's latest book, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, was published in 2018 by the same publisher.

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