This year we’re supporting several faculty projects that involve mapping “knowledge” – collections of ideas, groups of people, collections of objects. They have both geographic and non-geographic attributes. Eventually the faculty, and their students, will use spatial thinking to extract meaning from the representations: what are the relationships among the components, based on distance, connections, sequences.
To begin, we’re playing with NodeXL, but are likely to branch out to more customized tools later.
I like Flash-based interfaces, like this one that lets you explore the Abstraction movement of art history, from MoMA. Sites like these have matured. Instead of just including the graphical network itself, it’s now a multi-media experience, with other text, images, audio, etc., to expand and illustrate. I really like these.
