Comments, additions, help

Hi,

So I am using this blog as a place to get feedback on my “genealogy of influence” at http://mike-love.net. I’ve been working on this project since the summer of 2005: a graph of the influences between important writers, artists, scientists, mathematicians, economists, etc.

The goal is to enable a quick glance at the history of modern thought, and to support the discovery of important people you might not have otherwise known about. Two of Foucault’s works gave me the idea to create this tool: Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).

A graph is a set of nodes (points, vertices) connected by edges (lines). If the edges have directions associated with them, it’s called a directed graph.

I wrote my first attempt in the DOT language and created the graph using the nice and pretty Pixelglow Mac port of the automated graph layout program Graphviz. Graphviz allowed me to layout the graph, export as an image and as an HTML image map, with all the nodes linking to Wikipedia articles. It also allowed me to cluster people into movements. But as I added nodes, the connections became too dense to follow and the visualization lost value. I’ve kept it up on the site though, below the newer instance.

For the second attempt, I’ve used the GraphView demo applet that comes with the Prefuse toolkit, which is a Java library for information visualization, and re-coded the DOT file into a GraphML file.

It is possible to have the nodes link to Wikipedia articles, but I’ll have to learn some Java first. Jeffrey Heer, who worked on developing Prefuse, has explained how to do what I want to do at Sourceforge: “For those writing applets, just use the Applet API. Get the AppletContext and use the showDocument() methods. For example, you could create a ControlListener that has an Applet reference as a member variable and opens hyperlinks as needed.”