The choice for netMap and chronoMap was a tough one. There are few nice, open source tools out there, including prefuse, Simile Timeline, and Simile Exhibit. All of these are free, and very much in the spirit of Phylo. But each has its drawbacks, and using three different tools to run visualizations might slow down loading time and make integrating displays difficult. There’s also some worries about getting any Java-based tools to perform reliably in different browsers.

Flex overcomes a lot of these worries. It runs in a Flash environment (which is standard across all browsers) and it allows us to implement netMap and chronoMap in a single application. It also has some neat animated transitions, which you can see at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/samples/dashboard/dashboard.html.

The choice to go with Google Maps API was a bit easier. The application is constantly being expanded, and there are lots of ways to customize it for our needs. Ideally, we’ll overlay some Flex elements on Google Maps, but it’s hard to say where that technology will be by the time we launch.

At any rate, you can expect to see some slick and consistent visualizations run by Flex.

• an individuals display, which would identify personal influences on a particular
  individual, including their relationships with their teachers, graduate school peers, colleagues at appointed institutions, and dissertation advisees and committee members.
• an institutional display, which would show which philosophers worked and studied at a particular institution throughout the institution’s history, as well as the topics studied there at different times.
• an ideas display, which would reflect the intensity of study of specific philosophical ideas across time and place.

Over many conversations, we realized that these displays were running two things together: ways to visualize data (relational, chronological, geographical) and kinds of information displayed (individuals, institutions, ideas). The pairings were natural—and we still think they are—but we’ve realized that decoupling the display types from the data types opens up new options, (say) a network of citations, or a map of placement information.

Our current plan centers around three kinds of displays that can each handle any kind of information:

• netMap, a network-based display that shows relations and interconnections.
• chronoMap, a time-based display that tracks trends.
• geoMap, a geographic display that plots information in physical space.

We’ll have updates on these as we firm up which visualization tools we plan to use. We’d also like to hear suggestions about what kind of things you’d like these displays to show you about individuals, institutions, and ideas.