Network Visualization

Star Trek fans rejoice. Mollie Pettit from Datascope Analytics visualized the interactions between all the characters in all the movies, series, and episodes. This visualization shows interactions between characters in…

Musicmap is an attempt to show the history of music over time and how it came to be what it is today. Musicmap attempts to provide the ultimate genealogy of…

The Thinking Machine, by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, shows you the thought process of a computer trying to win at chess. There have been several iterations that date back…

I hear there’s some show called “Game of Thrones” that’s kind of popular these days. Twitter visualized how every episode was discussed, counting the character connections, the emojis used, and…

Flight pattern maps are fun to look at and reveal the complexity of air transportation on a daily basis. But, there are other angles to look at this data from.…

If you think of network visualization as a collection of nodes and edges, you typically get a bunch of circles and lines that vary in width to represent volume or…

A group of researchers are studying how all the galaxies in the universe are connected, network-style.…

Peter Dodds teaches a course on complex networks, and he put together a set of tarot cards to illustrate concepts. Fun. P.S. You can also watch the entire lecture series…

Plants and animals interact with each other to stay alive, which in turn forms complex systems. I think the Lion King covers the system simplistically in song-form at the beginning…

People with certain professions tend to marry others with a given profession. Adam Pearce and Dorothy Gambrell for Bloomberg Business were curious. When it comes to falling in love, it’s…

Martin Grandjean looked at the structure of Shakespeare tragedies through character interactions. Each circle (node) represents a character, and each connecting line (edge) represents two characters who appeared in the…

Remember when xkcd charted character interactions for fictional stories? Inspired by that and the upcoming Star Wars movie, Katie Franklin, Simon Elvery and Ben Spraggon made interaction charts for every…

This is a fun one. Software Galaxies by Andrei Kashcha visualizes popular software package managers as interactive galaxies. Each node is a package and connections indicate dependencies between packages. Use…

This is Walt Disney’s corporate strategy from 1957. The theatrical films serve as a foundation, and everything else — TV, music, Disneyland, etc — feed off of and back into…

March Madness starts this week in the states, which means it’s time for bracket predictions and picks. It’s when everyone in the office puts in 20 bucks, makes their picks,…

Part celebration of Samantha Cristoforetti, the first Italian woman to fly into space, and part social network above the clouds, Friends in Space by Accurat lets you follow Cristoforetti on…

Adam Cohen and his group are using genetically-modified neurons that light up when the cells activate to see the communication between neurons in high detail. More from New Scientist: Cohen’s…

The Internet Archive makes millions of digitized books available in the form of scanned pages, and these books are categorized into thousands of subjects. Focusing on book images, Mario Klingemann…

With Anheuser-Busch InBev rumored to have an interest in acquiring SABMiller and SABMiller trying to acquire Heineken, David Yanofsky for Quartz had a look at the structure of global beer…

Vax, a game by Ellsworth Campbell and Isaac Bromley, explores how a disease spreads through a network, starting with just one infected person. It’s a simple concept that works well.…

Gregor Aisch for the New York Times explored how the soccer clubs that play all year connect the national teams in this year’s World Cup. The best national teams come…

Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, was curious about careers after college degrees, so he used a quick Sankey diagram to look at data from the…

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy built the Legislative Explorer to show the lawmaking process in action. The visualization allows you to watch…

With player tracking installed in all of the NBA arenas, the sports analytics folks can essentially replay entire games through data and dissect the many facets of play. Andrew Bergmann…

Based on reviews from BeerAdvocate, Beer Viz, a visualization class project, asks you to choose a general style of beer and a beer that you like. Then it shows you…

The Donald Duck family tree is huge. Who knew? Above is only a sample. See the full version here.…

Using data from linguistics research by Kostiantyn Tyshchenko, Teresa Elms clustered European languages in this network graph. If you look closely, you might wonder why English is considered a Germanic…

Jessica Edmondson visualized the history of rock music, from foundations in the pre-1900s to a boom in the 1960s and finally to what we have now. Nodes represent music styles,…

There are over 5,000 subreddits with plenty of overlap and similarities. Randy Olson graphed them based on link activity and users and put them in an interactive. The overall view…

Fathom Information Design, in collaboration with the Knight Foundation and Quid, visualized the growth of civic tech based on an analysis of terms used to describe civic tech organizations and…