Eyeo talks
Over the past few weeks, Eyeo have been releasing their 2019 conference videos. I especially liked this one from Nadieh Bremer, which was based around the topic of connections.
She starts off with connections in their purest form, those that only exist because we imagine them. Constellations can seem like facts of astronomy, but different cultures have looked up and projected widely differing (though sometimes very similar) shapes and characters into the sky. She goes into detail about her 2018 project “Figures in the Sky”, which focuses on individual stars and visualises the different connections that cultures have seen around them.
Subtitled “How cultures across the world have seen their myths and legends in the stars”, it got me thinking about the way even language reflects this imagined link between people, culture and the stars. We say movie stars have a meteoric rise, movements have their big bang moment, important figures draw others into their orbit or are eclipsed by them. Somehow, we see our own dramas writ large in the sky – we are stars, and the stars are us.
Later in the video she also discusses projects visualising connections between the royal families of Europe, UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage designations, and more. There are dozens of great talks on Eyeo’s Vimeo page though, we enjoyed this one by Moritz Stefaner as well.
Constellation
On the topic of constellations, in August the Australian Signals Directorate (the friendly folks who spy on communications) released their data visualisation tool ‘Constellation’ as open source on GitHub.
Unfortunately it doesn’t run on Mac, but it looks fascinating.
According to the site:
Constellation is a graph-focused visualisation and data analysis application enabling data access, federation and manipulation activities across large and complex datasets. The software is suited to any network dataset with a rich feature dataset, including social network data, network infrastructure, chemical composition and many more.
Visualising the semantic web
When I think of connections I always think of the Semantic Web – Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of a web of linked data, where diverse information is openly available in machine readable ‘triples’ (e.g. Alien -> has Director -> Ridley Scott, Alien -> has Actor -> Sigourney Weaver), with entities drawn from publicly published ontologies.
The Semantic Web world isn’t famous for producing beautiful visualisations, but I had a scout around while writing this post and came across something interesting. This 2016 thesis by Italian developer Fabio Valsecchi describes his equally scientific and poetic attempts to visualise data from a semantic database of linked movie information, LinkedMDB.
Based on the idea that people have an intuitive understanding of landscapes, Valsecchi has visualised the different entity types within the database (e.g. films, directors, actors) as islands and countries. Each island contains many instances, for example the movie “Three Days of the Condor” above. The connections between this and other things, such as the film’s director and actors, are visualised almost like flight routes between the countries.
There’s a lot of crazy and interesting details in the thesis. Within each island are sub-areas (like film genres), and Valsecchi calls the map’s zoom function ‘semantic zoom’. The geography itself is based on Gosper Curves, also known as Gosper Islands.
Semantic web technology still hasn’t reached the popular consciousness, but it’s widely used (for example, it powers the little info boxes that appear alongside your Google search results). And just last year Amazon released Neptune, a cloud graph database that supports W3C’s RDF and SPARQL query language for semantic data.
