It’s all on the same map

Why would you want to read Mark Granovetter’s often-cited paper The strength of weak ties? Because it helped form the quote below.

“The most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.” (source)

Why might you want to read Albert-László Barábasi’s book Linked? Because it gives a pretty accessible introduction to how networks take shape, function and why we need to figure out what to do with power law distributions. I read it before I read The Starfish and the Spider, which posits that you can’t knock down the internet due to its distributed nature.

While it’s true that port 80 and our browsers would continue to work even if a highly connected node exited the network, Barábasi claims that, when enough hubs are removed, the network as a whole breaks up into smaller networks that are not in touch with one another. Have a look at GustavoG’s analyses of Flickrland in 2005 and 2008 to see clusters of highly connected groups and disconnected miniature networks.

Many of us are already highly networked and highly articulate about how we continuously link to one another, make use of our connections and also need to give back. It’s no small irony that we can be such skilled network users and yet understand so little of how they really function.

At the 2006 World Knowledge Dialogue, Paul Cilliers offered some consolation as to why we can’t fully comprehend, much less control, networks.

Due to their non-linear nature, complex systems are incompressible. They are also open systems and cannot be understood without also understanding their environments and their history. To fully know something complex will therefore involve incorporating all the complexity of the system and its environment. This not humanly possible, perhaps not even possible in principle. […]  Read the full text here.

I don’t know about you, but the fact that I’m living in a complex system variously makes me want to…

1. ignore the matter, become a modern luddite and go live a low-emissions life in a cottage made from reclaimed wood (or something)
2. read Latour’s books on Actor-Network theory until I “get” them. I’m not sure that’s possible, but perhaps I’ll enjoy imaginary dialogues on the matter.
3. be kind and try to live as good a life as I can (Pascal’s wager still holds)
4. some combination of the above, skewed towards #3.

Imagine my relief, then, when I came across Marco Quaggiotto’s ATLAS project, which uses a cartographic approach to make the social structures of knowledge detectable.

Knowledge cartographies / Trailer from Marco Quaggiotto on Vimeo.

If you look closely at the video, or a the full-size screenshots available on the Knowledge Cartographies website, you’ll see not just an excellent visualization but also a partial map of my world. Visualization, design, sociology, communication, intefaces and interaction design, information architecture … yep, it’s all there. I hope to see an API for it soon. I’d love to get an ATLAS point of view on my work landscape. Wordle (below) is fun and illustrative, but doesn’t show which items are related.

How Wordle views my bookmarks on Delicious

Interestingly, IBM’s network visualization tool is also called Atlas. See a screenshot on slide 28 in this SlideShare presentation. I’ll be back with more on social visualization (ooh, I think I coined a term there ) soon.