Visualization

Thank you to Howard Rheingold for turning me onto the Visual Complexity website. I have been interested for a long time in visualization technologies and their ability to make us more self-aware of our social relationships. These tools have increasingly moved from being exclusively used for information visualization and, as this site demonstrates, also adapted for what I have termed "collective visualization," enabling us to understand social, not just data, relationships. However, as I browse the site, I am struck, first and foremost, by how beautiful these network diagrams are and, second, by how little information they convey at a glance. That is not surprising. These sociograms are meant to prove power laws, demonstrate network complexity and then to be played with, unlocking their treasures only upon exploration. But we need more experimentation and development with tools designed to visualize, not simply that we are connected, but how. What are the structures of those relationships? What are the rules that govern them? What is the history and progress of our thinking and actions as a social network? The Visual Corporation project is at work on this, the next evolution in collective and social visualization.