Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess

I was reading a series of great blog posts about visualization of complex networks at the cleverly named Visual Complexity blog, and I was feeling a kindred spirit. References to Darwin, Edward Tufte, ecosystems.

I clicked on their Books list, and saw many of my favorites. What caught my eye was a link, under each book, called “map”. This references AmazNode, a flash app that uses Amazon’s recommended reading data to create a relational mapping.

A search like this:

 gives you a mapping like this:

 The static screenshot doesn’t even begin do it justice, because after you search, it grows slowly, with new connections being added every second for several minutes. The cloud bounces and jiggles and dances as new items pop up and add weight to parts of the cloud.

And then, you can drag and pull on any one book in the map to get a sense of the connections. Here is a screencap of me pulling the book Emergence around:

Many connections to Emergence, as shown by the many lines. And when you try it yourself, you’ll see the cool effect of stretching, pulling, and snapping into place. So when I pull on Emergence and drag it around the screen, the whole cloud follows it like a flock of sparrows.

If I drag around one of the books from the edge of the cloud, it will have a diminished effect, having the power to really only pull a few strings and not the whole cloud.

And each book provides more info and offers a clickthrough to Amazon. Very cool, not just from the perspective of finding related books, but as a cutting edge method for creating visualizations of complex networks.

Link: AmazNode Amazon Related Product Search

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General by Matthew Burgess