network visualisations and the ‘so what?’ problem
TRANSCRIPT
Network visualisations and the "so what?" problem
Mia Ridge, @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library
[email protected] #BLdigital
Expert Workshop Network Visualisation in the Cultural Heritage Sector8 June 2016, Belval campus , University of Luxembourg
CaveatNot a critique of individual visualisations shown
Context
Provocation: digital humanists love network visualisations...
...but ordinary people say, 'so what'?
http://fredbenenson.com/blog/2012/12/05/the-data-behind-my-ideal-bookshelf/
Location matters
Animated physics is ... pointless?
Size, weight, colour = meaning?
'What does this tell me that I couldn't learn as quickly from a sentence, list or table?'
http://fredbenenson.com
Which algorithmic choices are significant?
Mike Bostock, force-directed and curved line graphs of character co-occurence in Les Misérables
Via @scott_bot
'Can't see the wood for the trees'
http://viraltexts.org/
Stories vs hairballs
http://viraltexts.org/
No sense of change over time
http://viraltexts.org/
No sense of texture, detail of sources
http://viraltexts.org/
Jargon
• Node• Edge• Graph
More jargon
• Node• Edge• Graph• Directed, undirected• Betweenness• Closeness• Eccentricity
There is some hope...
Interactivity is engaging
http://viraltexts.org/
...but different users have different interaction needs
http://viraltexts.org/
Proceed, with cautionWorking tool (exploration, process) vs public output (explanation, product)
But first - who are your 'users'?
Sometimes a network visualisation isn't the answer ... even if it was part of the question.
No more untethered images
• Include an extended caption?– Data source, tools and algorithms used
• Link to find out more?– Why this data, this form?– What was interesting but not easily visualised?– Download the dataset to explore yoursel?
Interesting stuff
Cleaned data
Data available to researchers
All the data that could exist
Visualisation!
Iceberg idea HT Anne Baillot, Resisting networks
Talk about data that couldn't exist
'because we're only looking on one axis (letters), we get an inflated sense of the importance of spatial distance in early modern intellectual networks. Best friends never wrote to each other; they lived in the same city and drank in the same pubs; they could just meet on a sunny afternoon if they had anything important to say. Distant letters were important, but our networks obscure the equally important local scholarly communities.'Scott Weingart, 'Networks Demystified 8: When Networks are Inappropriate'
Help users learn the skills and knowledge they need to interpret network visualisations in context.
How? Good question!
