Delicious Graph Visualization

This is a visualization of delicious tags. Graphs are the sirens of data visualization - they look neat but one should demand more. What does this one actually mean?

The code that does the rendering was written by Kunal Anand. At least finding this picture has lead me to what looks to be an interesting blog.

Comments

[brian]

I apologize for the ot comment, but I was hoping that I could pick your brain a bit. I want to learn more about data visualization and am looking to pick up one or a few books.

Ideally, I'd like a book that goes over as many different types of visualization as possible, starting with common, straight-forward forms like histograms, box plots, etc. and moving along to more complex forms with case studies of when one might want to use one visualization technique as opposed to another.

I'm currently looking at "Graphics of Large Data Sets : Visualizing a Million" in Springer's Statistics and Computing series and "Information Graphics : A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference". The latter seems like a dictionary of forms of visualization, which will probably be helpful, but there doesn't appear to be much information about any one technique. The Springer book isnt out yet and Amazon hasn't turned on the "See inside the book" feature yet, but the title seems applicable to my project (working with server logs).

Could you recommend any books?

Thanks in advance.

[David Auber]

You should read the book :

Information Visualizatio : perception for design of Colin Ware and if you want to visualize (analyze) huge graphs, you should consider using the tulip graph visualization framework : www.tulip-software.org

regards,
david