1. Graphic formats (From Trees to networks)
Prof. Lily Díaz-Kommonen
School of Arts, Design & Architecture,
Aalto University
06 February, 2017
Introduce the notion of space as embodied representation: Eyes, ear, touch, kinaesthesia, ect.
They are dependent on the fact that we have a body that stands straight in perpendicular relation to the earth, with the force of gravitation exerting its influence on us.
In the context of perception, perspective relates to how objects appear to the eye depending on their distance. These are cues that our exploits to provide us with the perception of 3D space. It is said that this ability to perceive 3D space gave us an evolutionary advantage over other animals: ability to hunt and forage, to better discern proper plant species and thus avoid poisoning…
Perspective is dependent on viewpoint: “Perspective is entirely dependent on viewpoint. Relative positions and relative sizes of objects only change if the eye moves. It is not the angle of view of the lens that manipulates perspective, rather the shift of camera viewpoint forward with a wide lens, and backward with a long lens, in order to frame a subject in a similar way. This change of camera viewpoint creates the perspective differences often wrongly associated with the angle of view of the lens.”

2. Trees Porphyrian tree, Porphyry, 3rd Century AD.
Reproduced throughout antiquity.
Porphyrian tree, Porphyry,
3rd Century AD.

3. Trees Arbor Scientiae, Ramón Llull, 1295-12096, Rome
Arbor Scientiae – The Tree of Science by Raymon Llull (Catalán)
“Lima convincingly singles out 13th-century Spanish philosopher Ramon Llull as a key figure, whose encyclopedic Arbor Scientiae (Tree of Science) presented a unified vision of knowledge. His 16 domains of science, from the moral to the celestial, are each represented by a branch, and all are supported by a single trunk fed by 18 roots. The roots are also labelled, with nine bearing divine attributes such as wisdom, and nine signifying logical principles, including contrariety.”
Embodied representation: “The root of a problem.”
“Why do we love to organise knowledge into trees?” The New Scientist/Culture Lab, published on 2 April 2014 and accessed 07 February 2015,
Arbor Scientiae, Ramón Llull,
, Rome

4. Trees Finalism: Everything flows towards a pre-determined final goal.
Essentialism: Absolute understanding of the nature of being. About permanency, immutability.

5. Trees Diderot & D’Alembert, Encyclopédie…
“Diderot believed an encyclopedia to be a direcotry of associations, where the connections between the different areas of science could be exposed and further pursued by each individual reader.” Lima, Manuel Visual Complexity and Mapping of Information, Pricenton University Press, p. 39.
Diderot & D’Alembert,
Encyclopédie…

6. Trees Tree of Life, Darwin,
This changed with Darwin’s introduction of time into the equation. (Species could stop being in contact with others and evolve on their own…)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Darwin, added time and change to the way of thinking of science. Here is Charles Darwin's 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837) on view at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Interpretation of handwriting: "I think case must be that one generation should have as many living as now. To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction . Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B+D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation" (next page begins) "to ancient types with several extinct forms"
Tree of Life, Darwin,

7. Trees Pedigree of man, Ernst Haeckel, 1879.
Philogenetic history of life – tree visualizations by Ernst Haeckel that attempt to explain the interrelations among species.
“He thought to recognize the continuity of all natural things. However, he argued that if one must draw a sharp boundary… it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilised in one hand and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.” Kemp, Martin Visualizations, The Nature Book of Art and Science, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, p. 91.
Pedigree of man,
Ernst Haeckel, 1879.

8. Trees and hierachies
A tree structure or tree diagram is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. It is named a "tree structure" because the classic representation resembles a tree, even though the chart is generally upside down compared to an actual tree, with the "root" at the top and the "leaves" at the bottom.
Vertical extension relative to number of levels
Horizontal extension relative to number of nodes

9. Follow a top down approach to information organization
Trees
Centralized
Follow a top down approach to information organization
One ‘entity’ (or person?) is responsible
Linked to totalitarianism and absolutism
Linked to finalism and essentialism
Finalism: Everything flows towards a pre-determined final goal.
Essentialism: Absolute understanding of the nature of being. About permanency, immutability.
Considering the past milenia of history, we know that there has been change.

10. Trees
“IN THE early 1990s, 14 computer scientists at the University of Maryland were sharing an 80-megabyte hard drive. The drive was often overloaded, with expendable files taking up space in neglected sub-directories. Finding anything was like blindly reaching along all the branches of an overgrown tree.”
“There had to be a better way, thought departmental professor Ben Shneiderman. So he wrote a six-line algorithm that visualised the drive as a rectangle. Vertical divisions split the rectangle into smaller ones, representing directories, which then subdivided horizontally to show subdirectories. Each of the smallest rectangles corresponded to a megabyte of storage space, so free space was visible at a glance.” In “Why do we love to organise knowledge into trees?” The New Scientist/Culture Lab, published on 2 April 2014 and accessed 07 February 2015,
Show Agostino’s examples.
Tools

11. Voronoi Tree
Voronoi tree – uses polar coordinates: “a two-dimensional coordinate system in which each point on a plane is determined by a distance from a reference point and an angle from a reference direction.” Wikipedia, accessed 09 February 2016.
Voronoi tree of Consumer Price Index (The New York Times)
Alex Beutel’sInteractive Voronoi Diagram Generator with WebGL
alexbeutel.com/webgl/voronoi.html
Tool to generate Voronoi maps
Drawing voronoi trees

12. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Rhizome
Networks
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Rhizome
Multiplicity
Multilinearity
Acentered
Non-hierarchical
Non-signifiying system
See Justin Joqués visualization of A Thousand Plateaus.
Show (A little bit like the On Broadway interface.)

13. Ramón Cajal
Rhizomatic structures of nervous system according to the drawings of Ramón y Cajal (Catalonia)
About the importance of drawing in science
Our changing conception of Space. Show Powers of Ten Movie by Charles Eames.

14. Rhizome topology
Connects any point to another point in a transverse autonomous way.
Detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable.
Refers to organized complexity.

15. Paul Baran Centralized: single decision center
Decentralized: More than one decision center
Distributed: Uniformily distributed nodes with no decision center
“Paul Baran ( ) was Polish Jewish American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He invented packet switching techniques, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of the Internet and other modern digital communication. After joining the RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran took on the task of designing a "survivable" communications system that could maintain communication between end points in the face of damage from nuclear weapons.” Wikipedia (April 09, 2013)

16. Information visualization
Rigid, hierarchical classification systems based on tree arrangement
Distributed network-oriented methods
Bottom up classification systems
Tags/metadata
Folksonomies
Earlier classification systems based on “prestige of sources”, such as the Bible. Works are organized according to perceived importance Alfred Crosby has noted. He also has written about the invention of the double book entry system used in matrix organization.

17. Network thinking Cities The Brain WWW Social groups
Contemporary thinking is very much influenced by network thinking.

18. Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander’s 1965 models for the city with overlapping areas that “allows for different urban layers to co-exist”.

19. Internet= Inter + networks
SHOW movie,

20. Cartography of networks
“The graph is the preferred term to describe the pictorial representation of a network through a set of vertices (nodes) connected by edges (links)”
Visual Complexity, Mapping Patterns of Information, Manuel Lima, 2008.

21. 1930’s Jacob Moreno Sociograms
Jacob Moreno invented sociogram. Figure on the left shows the relationships within a class of fourth grades. Boys are triangles and girls are circles. It was published in the New York Times in 1933: Emotions Mapped by New Geography: Chart Seeks to Portray the Psychological Currents of Human Relationships”
Right: A social network.

22. Visualization of network visualizations
What are the nodes doing (e.g. how are they organized?)
How many connections do they have?
What are they sharing
Concentration of “traffic”, exchange.
Degree of relative importance
Connectedness

23. What is the grammar of maps?
Thematic cartography
What is the grammar of maps?
How can it be applied to network visualizations?
Beginning with Jacob Moreno’s attempts to map and measure the relationships between people, network visualizations are “the cartography of the indiscernible, depicting intangible structures that are invisible and undetected by the human eye”. Lima, Manuel Visual Complexity, Patterns of Information, Princeton University press. P. 80.

24. Thematic map
Beginning with Jacob Moreno’s attempts to map and measure the relationships between people.
5. Use clear visual language
6. Expose grouping
Law of similarity – elements that are similar in terms of color, shape, or size will be perceived as related
Law of common fate – elements that move in the same direction and at the same speed are perceived as being more related that elements that are stationary, or that move in different directions.
7. Maximize scalings – different patterns are revealed at different scales.
8. Macro view (pattern) – provides an overview so it needs to facilitate an understanding of the topology and the structure.
9. Relationship view – Is used to indicate connectivity
10. Micro view – is used to show nodes.
11. Support interaction – Overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand.” Schneidermann (Adaptive zooming, overview and detail, focus and context.)

25. TextArc http://www.textarc.org/ Invented by Brad Paley
Text analysis tool that shows the distribution of words in texts with no metadata descriptions.
Draws entire text sentence by sentence as an ellipse.
Every word is then drawn at its position in the book inside the ellipse next to the sentence in which it appears.
Words that appear near one another in the book show a similar color and are brighter if they appear more frequently.
Website,

26. Cloud tag
“A tag cloud (word cloud, or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites, or to visualize free form text.” Wikipedia, (April 09, 2013).
This is useful as a means of displaying metadata about an item that has been democratically "voted" on and where precise results are not desired. (last.fm)
In the second, more commonly used type,[citation needed] size represents the number of items to which a tag has been applied, as a presentation of each tag's popularity.
Tags are represented in a cloud where larger tags represent the quantity of content items in that category.

27. OpenStreetMap
“OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices. Created by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004, it was inspired by the success of Wikipedia and preponderance of proprietary map data in the UK and elsewhere.” Wikipedia, April 09, 2013.

28. Powers of Ten

29. Thank you!