Linked: The New Science of Networks

Yay for the UX book club! It's always nice to participate in such inspired discussions. This month we had a great conversation about networks as described by Barabasi. I had a desire to ask if anyone wanted to play Power Grid, but held myself back, not wanting to disturb the natural conversation with my non sequitur.

We talked a lot about the social aspects of networks, and twitter got mentioned pretty frequently. We drew a lot of lovely spiderwebby little graphs on the whiteboard walls at SVA. I found myself wondering how we could add a third dimension of fitness to the node and spoke diagrams. What would be the bet way to show change over time? There has to be a way to demonstrate trending. I think that we often see these kinds of visualizations as static, when in fact they only exist to illustrate a snapshot in time. I think most sociological concept graphics are like this. We recognize the connection, but not necessarily the health of the connection.

For the love of the grid

It's always amazing to me how much difference proportion makes in the impression that a statistical graphic gives.