When we started this project, we conceived of three displays:
- 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.
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