This is not a good visualization. It's actually harder to find the information one might be interested in and making comparisons is not easy or really possible.
Hmm, the topic is a nice one, but I think it proves the adage, “a force-directed graph visualization is never the right way to articulate anything.” It’s very hard to discern much of interest.
> To me this speaks volumes about data visualisation. Done incorrectly, it's useless.
I think it's worse than that: poor visualisations are counterproductive.
Visualisation techniques are practically valuable when they let the user understand something that would not otherwise be clear. For example, a tool might analyse a complex data set and use a visualisation that highlights facts that are relevant to answering a particular question.
In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't. It doesn't appear that any use is being made of the extra visual degrees of freedom offered by the astronomical metaphor, and extra visual degrees of freedom (spacial relationships, colours, sizes, shapes...) are usually what makes a good visualisation technique effective.
It has all the bad qualities of a powerpoint presentation - lots of chartjunk and a very low data/ink ratio. Abstract pictures like these are a kind of IQ trap because the author never explains what many of the lines actually represent. Smart readers may find some way to make sense of them but it's unlikely that any two readers will be able to come up with compatible definitions that lead to useful analysis.
I think if Marshall Clemens expressed those 5 web pages as 5 paragraphs, you would see that he's either not really saying much or is saying something that has plenty of counterexamples that aren't apparent in the pretty picture.
For a post about visualization, there are surprisingly few graphics in the article. Perhaps they want us to read and visualize, but I was disappointed to be frank.
It looks interesting, but I feel the visualizations remove value rather than add it; too busy and abstract so they end up being a distraction more than anything else.
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