Pros as graphs
I'm a regular reader of a blog called Information Aesthetics. It's all about different visualisations of information. I find a lot of the information fascinating, though recently I've been slacking off reading the feed.
However, I mentioned it in my Personal Statement, and what with having an interview for University soon, I thought I should catch up (as well as on current affairs).
One of the posts links to this website, which depicts various songs as a directional graph, each word being a node.
I've often wished I could come up with some of the wonderfully random ideas featured on Information Aesthetics, but have never been able to create anything good. This one, though, is very simple. So I thought I’d mimic it.
I’ve spent much of today researching graph theory, and how to layout graphs. I tried a couple of times to write my own layout engine, but they failed miserably. Finally I gave up and just researched existing solutions.
What I came up with was a combination of a program called GraphVis, which uses a proprietary scripting language to define the graphs, and a python interface to it called pydot.
Since I had already split up the input into a graph data structure, all I had to do was parse this again and add the nodes and edges using the pydot api.
Here are some of my results:
Little Piggy
Jabberwocky
Marilyn Manson
This Post
The Raven