A new visualization Bruce Herr and I recently completed is being featured in this week’s New Scientist Magazine (the article is free online, minus the viz).  They did a good job jazzing up the language used to describe the viz–’power struggle’, ‘bubbling mass’, ‘blitzed articles’–but they also dumbed down the technical accomplishments.  I guess not everyone gets as excited about algorithms as I do.

Before I talk anymore about the viz, though, let me mention its appearing at the NetSci 2007 Conference this week, and hopefully a varient will appear at Wikimania later this summer as well.  The viz is a huge 5 feet by 5 feet when printed, and I only include a low res, smaller version here.  At some point high quality art prints of it will appear at SciMaps for sale to fund further visualization research.

Now for the good stuff.  Much like my visualization of the netflix prize competition data, we began this piece by representing the data as a network.  In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and the edges are the links between articles.  We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000 nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another.  These are the yellow dots, which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint to the whole picture.