Semantic Multi-Dimensional Data Graph

Every now and then, the magazine issues of renowned newspapers write about something you wouldn't expect them to report. The last incident of that sort occurred to me when I found out that the New York Times Magazine published an article about data visualisation.


image is property of James N. Sears

A project by James N. Sears, a programmer and computer artist, and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram Publishers is attempting to visualize semantic relations of specific words or names. The project was done with a cross-platform and open source software called processing, resulting in an interactive piece of data visualisation. Not only that it looks damn cool and is fun to play around with, the authors claim that one of its practical applications might be cross-referencing and data analysis of intelligence data, making the information at hand more accessible to analysts.

The illustrations I did for the New York Times in collaboration with Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram were published in today's edition of the New York Times magazine. The illustrations, created in Processing, are the result of a physics-based model of keywords connected by springs. The strength of the virtual spring connecting a pair of keywords together is dependent upon their rate of cooccurrence on the Internet, a measure of their degree of relationship to each other. In addition to the three tiles shown above which are featured in the online version of the article, the cover of the magazine and the following pages of the print article all feature different views of the model.

Similar views, populated with data collected from internal networks, could be used by intelligence agencies in their efforts to determine terms that are interconnected and being discussed by diverse and disconnected agents.