As some attentive users of Visual Complexity might have noticed, the number of projects featured on the website has slowly come to a halt, with the perpetual grand total of 777 being a grieving reminder of inactivity for well over a year. Today, If you go the the main page and look at the top right corner, you will see an invigorating new message: “Indexing 782 projects”. Of course I didn’t want to write this blog post to announce that five new projects have been added to the database. This recent addition is part of a larger plan I’ve been wanting to share with you for some time.

In October 2015, Visual Complexity will celebrate its 10th Anniversary, a significant feat considering the life-span of many online projects, and an eerie memo that a long time has gone by since I launched the website after graduating from a MFA program at Parsons School of Design. In order to commemorate this event, I plan on reaching 1,000 projects by October next year. 1,000 projects in 10 years. As you can imagine, this is not an easy enterprise, so I’m relying immensely on Angela Zhou, a researcher and student at Princeton University, to help me gather and document many new additions to Visual Complexity. There might also be a small celebration, which I will announce closer to the date. But for now, be sure to watch for new projects being added to the website. If you want to contribute to this ongoing research, please use the “Suggest a Project” form on the homepage, in order to recommend a new network visualization.

As exposed earlier in the year, The Book of Trees 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. With roughly 200 images, the book offers a visual evolutionary history of this universal metaphor, showing us the incremental adoption of a stylized, abstract construct, as well as a recent emergence of new visual models, many employing advanced computer-generated algorithms.

The eleven chapters that compose the book feature a number of visual methods and techniques for the representation of hierarchical structures. The first (and longest) chapter features primeval tree diagrams, which bear a close resemblance to real trees and are, at times, significantly embellished. The remaining ten chapters can be grouped into two sections. The first, comprising chapters two through six, covers the earliest forms of diagrammatic, abstract tree charts and includes different types of node-link diagrams, where given nodes, entities, or “leaves” are tied across different levels by links, edges, or “branches.” The second group, encompassing chapters seven through eleven, explores more modern and recently popular approaches, showcasing various types of space-filling techniques and adjacency diagrams that use polygonal areas and nesting to indicate different ranking levels.

A shot of the Table of Contents by the Paperposts.me blog

The book also features a Timeline of Significant Characters: key people in the establishment of the tree metaphor in depicting almost every relevant aspect of knowledge throughout the centuries. Amongst the twelve characters listed are the names of Aristotle, Joachim of Fiore, Ramon Llull, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel.

You can continue following updates on The Book of Trees on its official website or its Facebook page.

I was immediately hooked. Published in the end of 2012, and including a few references to Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, Philogeny Mandala is a well curated visual journey into the tree diagram and by far the closest book in scope to The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge. This deduction is purely based on the association of images within the book, since unfortunately I’m not fluent in Japanese.

Minaka has been an avid scholar of phylogenetic diagrams, biological classification, and evolutionary science, as you can attest from the sheer number of books and papers showcased in his website. When I first discovered his work, I was extremely joyful for having found such a kindred spirit. Today, I’m very excited to announce that Minaka will be translating The Book of Trees to Japanese, to be published by BNN in 2015. I simply couldn’t hope for a more knowledgeable and qualified translator.

There are many online versions of this work, but if you want to get a decent, well-bound copy of this beautiful book, Taschen has recently published one that I highly recommend.

You can read more about Taschen’s copy here and here.

A few more online resources about the Nuremberg Chronicle:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Chronicle
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedelsche_Weltchronik
- http://www.wdl.org/en/item/4108/
- http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/21.36.145

A common juxtaposition, shown during many of my lectures, between a neuronal network (left) and the vast cosmic structure (right).

As it turns out, this inquiry might not be as far-fetched as we might think. A few days ago, National Geographic posted an intriguing article titled Astronomers Get First Glimpse of Cosmic Web, where they report how scientists have for the first time captured a peek of the “vast, web-like network of diffuse gas that links all of the galaxies in the cosmos.” As stated in the article:

Leading cosmological theories suggest that galaxies are cocooned within gigantic, wispy filaments of gas. This “cosmic web” of gas-filled nebulas stretches between large, spacious voids that are tens of millions of light years wide. Like spiders, galaxies mostly appear to lie within the intersections of the long-sought webs.

From the original image caption in the article: Computer simulations suggest that matter in the universe is distributed in a “cosmic web” of filaments, as seen in the image above from a large-scale dark-matter simulation. The inset is a zoomed-in, high-resolution image of a smaller part of the cosmic web, 10 million light-years across, from a simulation that includes gas as well as dark matter. The intense radiation from a quasar can, like a flashlight, illuminate part of the surrounding cosmic web (highlighted in the image) and make a filament of gas glow, as was observed in the case of quasar UM287. Credit: Anatoly Klypin and Joel Primack, S. Cantalupo

This find is not just impressive and thought-provoking, but it could also become a major focus of the emerging fields of complex systems and network science.

While investigating various tree diagrams, charts, and illustrations for Chapter 1 of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, I became deeply obsessed with tree iconography. I remember being particularly enthralled with ancient figures from medieval Europe and three-thousand-year-old Assyrian stone carvings. During this research period, and despite my best efforts, I could never find a wide-ranging book dedicated to the tree as one of the most popular, captivating, and widespread visual archetypes. This was ultimately the crucial impetus that propelled me to create my latest work, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge.

The final cover of The Book of Trees

Trees are one of the most ubiquitous religious symbols across the world. From ancient Sumer to Christianity, from the Maya civilization to Buddhism, there’s hardly a human society over the ages that hasn’t associated trees with some sort of celestial and religious power.

The omnipresence of such a revered symbol reveals an inherently human fascination with trees that goes well beyond sacred devotion. Due to its expressive quality and natural branching scheme, trees have also become important communication tools, illustrating a variety of topics such as family ties, moral values, systems of law, domains of science, biological species, hard disk drives, database schemas, and online discussions. As a direct embodiment of hierarchy and multiplicity, the allegorical tree figure has lasted hundreds of years as one of the most enduring archetypes in the history of visual communication.

The Book of Trees 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. With roughly 200 images the book offers a visual evolutionary history of this universal metaphor, showing us the incremental adoption of a stylized, abstract construct, as well as a recent emergence of new visual models, many employing advanced computer-generated algorithms. Ultimately, this book makes visualization a prism through which to observe the evolution of civilization.

Pre-order now at Amazon and take advantage of the one-time special price.

]]> http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1271 http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/blog/?p=1159 http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/blog/?p=1159#comments Wed, 07 Aug 2013 12:15:18 +0000 Manuel Lima http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/blog/?p=1159 In the Preface of my new book (more details to come soon) I mention the importance of an historical analysis of visualization, since it’s critical for us to understand its long evolution and not be overly infatuated by the work created in the last decade alone. In this context I provide a quote by Michael Friendly, who stated: “There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.”

Figurative Trees

The tree figure is perhaps one of the most enduring, widespread visual metaphor for mapping information. With deep roots in medieval visual exegesis and illuminated manuscripts, its alluring arboreal structure has been adopted by numerous scholars, researchers, designers, and illustrators over centuries to map an incredible array of knowledge domains. Here is a simple timeline showing four distinct executions (with year below) comprising roughly a 800-year span:

Arc Diagrams

But trees are not the only visual model being used for centuries. In 2001, Martin Wattenberg introduced a novel way of visualizing a song as a sequence of translucent arcs with varying width. The method showcased in The Shape of Song is better described by Wattenberg himself: “Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.” The project website shows a striking gallery of images that give shape to various songs by artists such as Bach, Madonna, and Philip Glass.

This interesting technique became known as Arc Diagrams and was immediately followed by numerous projects, many of which I’ve been documenting over the years in VisualComplexity.com. Here are just some of the many visualizations embracing this approach:

However, this method is not entirely new. In fact, arc diagrams have been used for over a thousand years and were particularly popular in middle-age Europe in the depiction of, guess what, musical compositions. Many of these intricate diagrams accompanied medieval texts on musical theory and aimed at translating complex sequences of musical tones and intervals, such as tetrachords, in order to facilitate understanding. They were ultimately educational tools meant to be attentively studied and analysed.

Here are some remarkable examples:

But from all the cases I found, the double-page chart below from a 13th-century manuscript is arguably one of the most complex and intricate examples of this old technique. A great specimen of medieval visual exegesis that served as a teaching tool for musical theory, this graph represents the various divisions of a monochord–an ancient single-string musical instrument.

* Ancient arc diagrams from: Murdoch, John E. Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Vol. 5 of Album of Science. New York: Scribner, 1984.

Treemaps

As one of the most hailed methods of modern information visualization, the treemap has truly become an epitome of the recent growth of the field and one of the most widespread methods for visualizing hierarchies. Credited with inventing the method in 1991, when trying to find an optimal solution to visualize the file structure of his hard drive, Ben Shneiderman’s contribution is invaluable, opening the door to a great diversity of novel approaches, such as the circular and voronoi treemaps. Here’s a screenshot from one of the earliest modern treemaps:

Shneiderman is certainly the father of the modern, computer-generated treemap, which introduced an important recursive tilling algorithm able to handle large, multi-level hierarchies. But the concept was not entirely groundbreaking. Area diagrams and simplified rectangular treemaps had been in use for several decades before Shneiderman’s preeminent work.

The image below shows a comparative diagram showing the size and population of each continent and country of the world, part of a world atlas compiled in 1845. This is a four-level treemap, where the world (1) is comprised of three major “continents” (2), divided into regions (3), and further subdivided into individual countries (4).

The following chart is perhaps known to some of you, since it has surfaced in a few places in print and online like Fast Company. It is not only one of the earliest examples of a rectangular treemap, but also makes a compelling use of the small multiples technique.

Old Visual Metaphors

As with many other contemporary visualization techniques, the previous examples show us that the roots of arc diagrams and treemaps are considerably deeper than what they seem. Even though I only explored two visual methods in this post, a similar analysis could easily embrace many other present-day models. Others, such as hyperbolic trees, seem to be genuinely digital-native, given it’s dynamic exploration of hyperbolic space and reliability on human-computer interaction. Still, their unmistakable predecessors - radial trees - have been in use for several decades, and many researchers and artists, most notably E. C. Escher, have throughly investigated hyperbolic geometry in their work.

The goal of this post is not to devalue the contribution of main figures in modern information visualization, nor to provide a negative everything-has-already-been-invented attitude. Above all, it is to recognize the ancient evolution of this discipline and the achievements of the past, to understand their origins, progress, challenges, failures, and successes. As Mark Twain appears to have said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

You can also see below an insightful talk by Raworth at the Royal Society of Arts where she explains the theoretical framework behind the image.

“I’m really stoked by the traction this diagram has had […] and I’m asking myself why?”, stated Raworth during her talk, and she then exposed three reasons to explain the diagram’s recent popularity (in her own words):

(1) The framing of planetary boundaries is a very very powerful one, it makes the complexity of earth system science accessible to non-scientists and helps us to see the planet as a whole, as a system of interlocking processes that we depend upon for our well-being.

(2) By putting that social foundation in the heart of it, it brings into one simple picture the world of development and the world of environment, and it helps to end the false dichotomy that we face that either you are for development and ending poverty, or you are for protecting the environment (…)

(3) People are interested in it because it gives us a chance to rethink economic development, instead of starting with economic growth, we start with the fundamentals of what we care about (…)

It’s particularly interesting to recall that less than four years ago the term infographic used to cover any type of chart, graph, diagram, histogram, table or illustration conveying a specific data attribute. We called it simply, an information graphic. But over the past few years, the expression has become closely associated with a long vertical table encompassing a variety of graphical elements, such as maps, uncanny clip art, miscellaneous charts, large text and bulky numbers. This association is currently so strong that it seems almost impossible to keep the two concepts apart. Consequently, the recent outburst of popularity of infographics has caused the emergence of various companies dedicated almost exclusively to the production of this type of graphic for private clients, institutions, blogs, and mainstream media; making it arguably one the strongest economic forces within the information design landscape.

But as with many other types of contemporary graphics, the idea in itself is not entirely novel. The papyrus roll from Ancient Egypt, the direct ancestor of the modern book, is conceivably also the ancient forefather of modern infographics. Consisting of papyrus sheets pasted edge to edge with a slight overlap, the text and graphics was set out in columns, and drawn up at right angles to the edge of the rolls. Even though most papyrus were meant to be read from left to right, unrolling them as the reader went along, some also explored a vertical top-down linear narrative. This concept was further propelled across Middle Age Europe, where scholars were at loss trying to integrate all the new knowledge coming from the ancient world, and biblical exegesis was evolving from a simple allegorical division to a complex analytical process. During this stage we can witness a variety of parchment scrolls employing a diagrammatic representation of  biblical tales, family trees, systems of law, knowledge maps, amongst many other topics. On the left we can see two compelling medieval specimens. The first on the left is a small part of a remarkable genealogy of Christ from circa 1130-1205, while the second is a depiction of the genealogical tree of the House of Habsburg, circa 1540.

But out of all the cases I’ve seen in the past, the chart below is perhaps one of the best examples of a prototypical infographic and a strong progenitor of such a concept, abundantly explored in the last few years. This 19th century piece is showcased in the magnificent book The Cartographies of Time, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010.

Printed by Joshua Himes in 1842, A Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel and John, integrates the visual logic of the timeline, chronological calculus and apocalyptic symbolism in a single scheme. The final date in the left-hand column, 1843, indicates the coming of the end of the world. As BibliOdyssey explains in a post: “This infographic is based on the religious revivalist predictions of the New England minister, William Miller. From the 1830s, Miller’s followers produced stirring books, pamphlets, broadsides and innovative graphics to spread the word of the coming apocalypse, often displayed and distributed at popular camp meetings.”

The resemblance with modern-day infographics is primarily based on three features: (1) The portrayal of a specific story or topic in a long top-down graphical layout. (2) The use of specific illustrations or clip art (in the case of present-day versions) with complementary text to better elucidate the various components of the subject. (3) The inclusion of large numbers to convey specific quantities pertaining to the analyzed topic.

Here’s a comparison of the 1834 chart next to two modern infographic approaches: