A visual history of human knowledge

This book provides a remarkable backdrop to understand the motivations driving European High Middle Age scholars in trying to better organize information and come up with scales to measure every conceivable aspect of human life. The book covers an important shift from a world based on qualities to one based on quantities, and is a great read for whoever is interested in the origins of numeral systems, measurement and quantification.

An inspiring work on the omnipresence of networks and the importance of complexity science. I read this book when I was delving into data visualization and simply became obsessed with deciphering many of the complex structures abounding natural and man-made systems.

If Weaver provides the scientific framework for the surge of organized complexity, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari deliver the philosophical context for the transition from trees to networks. In their “A Thousand Plateaus” Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of a “rhizome”, in opposition to the traditional hierarchical structure of the tree, in part because “trees have made us suffer too much”. The rhizome, on the other hand, is a concept without a centre or general in command, it’s a non-linear, networked system, filled with multiplicities and interdependencies.

In this article from 1948, American scientist Warren Weaver divides the history of modern science into three distinct stages and was able to forecast the recent rise of complexity science. While the first period, covering most of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, encapsulated what he denominated as “problems of simplicity”, the second phase, taking place during the first half of the twentieth century, involved “problems of disorganized complexity". But the last stage defined by Weaver, initiated in the second half of the twentieth century and continuing to this day, is critically shaped by “problems of organized complexity". According to Weaver, not only have we recognized the presence of exceedingly complex systems, with an outstanding number of variables, but we have also come to realize the notion that these variables are highly interconnected and interdependent.

The influential Atlas of Cyberspace (a website converted into a book by the same name) is a great showcase on how designers, researchers and scientists in the 1990’s were trying to represent the new “virtual” territory of cyberspace using a variety of visualization metaphors. This project was a major influence in my life and one of the main triggers for my interest for network visualization.

Networkism.org keeps track of the growing number of artists operating under the new Networkism movement, a growing artistic trend characterized by the portrayal of figurative graph structures—illustrations of network topologies revealing convoluted patterns of nodes and links.

I founded VIsualComplexity.com in October 2005 as a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. Currently featuring 1,000 projects the website was the main source of my first book Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information.