VisualComplexity.com
10 Years / 1,000 Projects
Ten years ago, precisely on October 9th, 2005, VisualComplexity.com (VC) was born. The website’s launch was announced in the very last entry of my MFA Thesis Diary blog (a collection of research bits pertaining to my graduate thesis project Blogviz), where I stated the following:
Finally I has able to build the project that has been in my mind for quite a while. This is probably my last entry in this blog, since VisualComplexity.com is going to incorporate most of the research and projects previously shown here, and with time, much much more…
“With time much much more…”, undoubtedly an apt forecast of what was to come in the future. In the same blog post, I exposed the goal of the project, which has remained unaltered to this day: “to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks”, and to “leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.”
Over the next paragraphs I will look back and reflect on the evolution and impact of VC, as well as its future.
Growth
The earliest documented memory of VC in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine dates to November 3rd, 2005, where it was featuring 212 projects. Over the years this visualization archive has grown considerably, featuring 212, 367, 507, and 705 projects in similar periods, respectively for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009. The slowest period was between 2011–2014, with only 10 new projects being added to the database (it went from 767 in 2011 to 777 in 2014). However, if we look at the butter bar on screenshots below, we can perceive the two main motives for this long interlude — the launch of my first (2011) and second (2014) book.
However, in mid-2014, I decided to change this downward trend and commit to a bold effort: reaching 1,000 projects by its 10th anniversary. Today, VC stands with 1,000 indexed projects, making 2015 an unparalleled year with 233 new projects added, only behind its very first year with 367 projects — even though the website kicked off with close to 200 projects already in the database. As you can imagine, this was not an easy enterprise, so I was fortunate to rely on Angela Zhou, a researcher and student at Princeton University, to help me in this final stretch.
Design
From the comparison below one can see how VisualComplexity.com evolved over time, by adopting new features and resources, while trying to make it more useful for users.
The first screengrab archived, from November 2005, shows the bare origins of VC. Notice its simplicity and absence of features — no ads, RSS feed, or alternative filters — only a grid of projects, a small set of categories, and the ability to suggest a project. By October 2006 (a year after its launch) a few things had been added, including the first ads, RSS feed, discussion (an attempt at a forum for the community), and more advanced filters for projects, which were still chronologically organized and rendered in full. The new model visible in October 2007 was perhaps the most impactful one: the number of projects displayed was capped (due to loading times), expanded to 7 projects per row, and rendered in an inverse chronological fashion (so the most recent projects would always be on the top); an array of new filters was added, e.g., most visited projects, popular searches; and finally, a tally of total projects was introduced on the top right. By October 2009 the design had fully matured into what it is today: new logo, better navigation (header and image views), more resources (stats, blog, book), and more filters (visual methods, trends). Despite a continual change over the years, one design element has persisted: the evocative mosaic of thumbnails luring users into a given project’s details.
Structure
The primary way of browsing projects in VC has always been by Subject — a list of high-level domains, such as Transportation Networks, Business Networks, Biology, and Art. This list has been almost intact since day one, apart from the inclusion of Music and Political Networks in 2007. The first two, Knowledge Networks and Social Networks, account for roughly 28% of the entire database. Today this is the breakdown of all 1,000 projects over VC’s main 16 categories:
Apart from browsing projects by subject, users can also scan by year and top authors (a ranking system of all artists, scientists, researchers, designers), but the two most interesting filters in VC have been the trend and method. The trend filter— a way of looking at projects based on the topical trend (a mix between platforms and niche sub-genres), e.g., Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Twitter, Terrorism, Blogosphere— became the main corpus of Chapter 04 of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, entitled “Infinite Interconnectedness”, while the method filter (arguably the most innovative one) gave users a way of reviewing projects based on their visual model and ended up becoming the core of the book’s Chapter 05, “The Syntax of a New Language” (see below).
Impact
When it was launched ten years ago, VisualComplexity.com was one of the few resources for a growing data visualization community, together with Infosthetics (December 2004), JunkCharts (July 2005), and a small handful of other blogs. It’s hard to conceive a time of such bareness, when our community had to live without many of the useful resources we now take for granted, such as FlowingData, EagerEyes, DataVisualization.ch, VisualisingData, InformationIsBeautiful, InfoVis:Wiki, amongst many others, but this was indeed the bleak landscape of online data visualization discourse back in 2005.
The biggest consolation of putting such a project together is undoubtedly realizing how many people it has touched, influenced, and inspired. Over the years many people have reached out to me and praised the effort of putting together such a resource, and I know that many of them have since joined this community because of VC. I still fondly remember receiving an email from an architect, back in 2007, sharing a project he had being working on inspired by a social network diagram he had seen in VC. It is this type of cross-pollination between domains that really gets me excites me.
Personally, the project got me fully immersed in the burgeoning field of data visualization, in a time when I was a mere naive enthusiast. Over the past ten years it took me across the globe in countless lectures, talks, seminars, and workshops, from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Taichung, Taiwan, from universities like Harvard and the Royal College of Art, to large events like TED and Ars Electronica. VC was also the primary catalyst for my first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, and a strong influence in my second The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge.
Future
Maintaining such a resource requires a lot of work, commitment, and time, something that has been more scarce lately, particularly after the birth of my daughter Chloe. Even if I had more time to dedicate to VC, the growing number of projects created by our expanding community makes it increasingly hard for any single person to keep track of it.
As of today, I won’t be adding new projects to the database nor will I be updating the website in any substantial manner. However, VC will be kept alive and available online 24/7 for as long as I can, continuing its role as an “unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks” (from its about page created in 2005). More importantly, in the next couple of weeks, after doing some data cleaning, I will be opening the VC dataset to the general public! I truly hope our community will enjoy playing with this dataset and hopefully projects like ReMap will surface, completing VC’s main goal of becoming a map of maps.
Reaching 1,000 projects is a very rewarding milestone. It is still a small repository if we look at the sheer volume of visualization projects produced in the past two decades alone, but notwithstanding, VC will continue to be an important, self-contained lab to analyze the evolution and diversity of network visualization. There’s also something appealing about intentionally closing this chapter after 10 committed years. It forces me to think about what might come next and leaves me open to new possibilities. Thank you all for your love, support, and inspiration over the years!
