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visualcomplexity.com

A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

2008 City Railway System

According to the authors, each city's various subway structures and railway systems should reflect somehow the character of that city. In an effort to infuse the city's identity into its subway map, while also trying to simplify and beautify the original diagram, Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol produced a series of original maps for three city subway systems - the Seoul Railway, Tokyo Railway and Osaka Railway. More cities are in the design phase and others are being planned.

The first image depicts Tokyo's intricate network of subway, lightrail and monorail, with more than 1500 stations covering the metropolitan area. Placed in the city center is the Imperial Palace, the residence of the current Ten-no (Japanese Emperor). Subway lines circumvent the expansive ground claimed by the Imperial Palace. This characteristic is visualized in this map by the concentric circles spreading out to the entire city, with the center in the Imperial Palace ground. This strong representation of circles is reminiscent of the national flag of Japan and the Japanese identity expressed in the flag.

The second represents Seoul's network. The city boasts 600 years of history as the capital of the South Korea and its crossed by a river of great magnitude, which has become one of its most important symbols, the Han Gang. The depiction of Han River in this map mimi

The Tax Map

The Tax Map is a graph of the United States Tax Code, represented as a network. In the network each node represents a section of the tax code, while each edge represents a reference from one section to another. As the author explains, the project was born by a desire to better understand how the complexity of this mass of rules and exceptions would bear out if one were to "look at the mere structure of the tax code, stripped naked of its rules and semantics."

Each colored circle represents a section of the tax code. Size is determined by how many times that section of the tax code is referenced by other sections of the tax code; while color is determined by the ratio of references to a particular statute, by references made by the statute itself. This ratio is then calculated against a color range from blue to red to determine the final color. Finally, each line represents a reference from one statute to another. The color of the line is determined by whether the reference remains within a single chapter, or goes to a statute in another chapter. White lines are for intra-chapter, while colored ones are for inter-chapter. Each chapter is given its own color for outgoing references.

The Tax Map was created by using the Perl and Java programming languages. Perl was used to scrape the online tax code for the relevant data. Java was used to render t

Complexcity

The Complexcity project explores major cities around the world focussing on how their urban sprawls have evolved over time. Using the patterns formed by roads in each city, Korean born designer Lee Jang Sub creates complex graphic configurations, combining the idea of natural and man made systems. In the process he finds a concealed aesthetic within the convoluted pattern of urban networks. He started with his hometown Seoul, and has already completed Paris, Rome, and Moscow. The first image illustrates the intricate urban pattern of Moscow, while the second is representative of Paris.

He has also produced a range of wall decorations using the same idea for spanish company Granada Design.

Semantic Graphs of French Intellectual Property Rights

These work-in-progress maps are part of a study produced in the spring of 2008 for economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, law professor at the French engineering school UTC. They represent the linked terms of vocabulary used on the Web to talk about the intellectual property rights in French. The datasets came from the search engine Exalead SA.

Each node is a term and each edge exists when two terms or expressions are co-cited on a sufficient number of web pages, over more than 120,000 pages. 1283 expressions and 4984 co-citing links have been selected, assuming a representative approach against an exhaustive one. The first image is a detail of the general map where semantic clusters are represented with different color-nodes. The second image is a test to display the imprint of two meta-clusters : the vocabulary of intellectual property rights (in red) versus the one of industrial property rights (in blue).

2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: Job Titles of Donors

With thousands of donors for McCain and Obama, the authors wanted to analyze the types of people donating by examining the top 250 job titles for each candidate and trying to determine how much influence they have on the overall donations viewed in their previous visualization.

Since the donation information must be disclosed to the public, they turned to the Federal Election Commission to find a data set containing all donors, the amount they donated as well as other information the authors may try to explore next (i.e. occupation, zip code, employer).

The first image represents all donations made to Obama, and the second to McCain. The job titles (on the left side of the arc), start from the most common (Retired for both) on the left to the least common (of the top 250 titles) on the right. The right side of the arc is segmented into dollar brackets. The left bracket are amounts less than $100, the second is $100 to $500, the third is $500 to $1000 and the last (the largest) is over $1000. Also, the size of the right side ($ amount) segments are sized according to the total percentage of donation amount from the donors listed.

The most obvious result is that the most common donors for both candidates donated in the top-mos