ShanWang-LookingOutwards-07

Five Levels Deep, centered on category of History

The WikiViz,  or the Visualizing Wikipedia project created by Chris Harrison was of particular interest to me. As a human edited entity and encyclopedia, connections between topics are really complicated and sometimes surprising. The comprehensive organization and visualization of these data are fascinating and sometimes revealing: it’s hard to believe how interconnected seemingly unrelated topics can be. Getting frustrated with GraphViz, Chris decided to build his own large-scale visualization project.

He demonstrated the progress in version 5 of this project in terms of graph layout algorithm, which allowed him to scale the enormous amount of vertices and edges (articles and article links) into a relatively manageable one with a shorter run time. For future improvement, he is still working on the collection of true page links with data directly from article content for a more accurate representation of Wikipedia’s true structure.

He had included some sample renderings of topics centered on different categories on his website.