I got the first one under “Art” category:
Since it is not supposed to make any sense statistically, it is more for expressing the complexity and interoperability nature of web science. Being as a developer myself, I can totally understand what this visualization is trying to tell us. It is a static visualization, in which there are tree like structure in different colors representing different branch of web development technologies supposedly, such as front end development, web services, database system and etc. Each of them contains nodes and branches, in which presenting difference issues and sub-topics under certain greater topics. Also, these “trees” are intermingled, sharing same nodes, which indicate the fact that most of subjects in web science can not be studied or implemented standalone and acquire interdisciplinary thinking . In Chapter 2 of Lima, he mentions this kind of tree structure has “a significant influence in postmodern thinking, particularly in areas like communication theory, cyberspace theory, complex systems…”(44 Lima). I see this visualization as a perfect proving of his theory, as modern technologies become more subdivided and simply more complicated than any before.
Since I am also a fan of music of any kinds, I also found this one really interesting.
Here is the website for the origin visualization: http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic/interactive-music-map/index.html
This one is called ” How music travel”. It is a dynamic visualization of the evolution of western dance music. Personally I think what make this visualization powerful and straightforward is the dynamic feature. From the screenshot we realize that there are tons of genres of music crossing different continents, and we can not really get any useful conclusion out of this static screenshot. Due to the nature of the data, the evolution of music, which is developing chronologically, dynamic visualization can be put in a good use here by only exposing certain part of data,which arranged in the order of time, to user at a time. Like Sinclair mentioned in his article, “Interactive visualizations, on the other hand, aim to explore available information, often as part of a process that is both sequential and iterative.” This visualization is undoubtedly one of the best presentations of how different visualization should be used properly in order to maximize the understanding of the certain data.
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