Mapping the Asian/Pacific American Community in New York City
Hillel Arnold
I wanted to introduce you to something I've been thinking about for a
while now, and would like to start working on more seriously. Last
year I was involved in a project to survey and describe archival
collections pertaining to the Asian and Pacific American communities
in the NYC metropolitan area.
My colleagues and I quickly realized that, as with any community,
there was a complex web of relationships at play that determined which
groups and individuals were friendly and which weren't. We also
realized that this valuable information wasn't recorded anywhere.
Lacking a better idea, we started putting these relationships into a
spreadsheet, and I created a very rudimentary graph using Many Eyes.
You can see the results on the home page of the project's website:
http://dlibdev.nyu.edu/tamimentapa/
However, I was never satisfied with this visualization because it
doesn't give you a good enough sense of who/what the individuals/
organizations are or the nature of the relationship(s) between them.
I’d like to develop something that gives users more detail on the
nodes (possibly pulling from the information from the survey
descriptions and/or other places) as well as the arcs (I’m thinking of
using the Relationship vocabulary to do this http://vocab.org/relationship/.html).
I’m fairly comfortable with modeling this data in RDF. Where I need
some guidance/help is in developing the visualization itself. I’m not
really a programmer, so my skills are a little lacking in this area.
I’ve looked for other examples of what I’d like to do, but nothing
I’ve seen really encompasses all the elements of what I’d like to do.
Does anyone have any suggestions of visualizations that approximate
what I’ve described, or other suggestions of how I might piece this
together?
Thanks,
Hillel
Jon Voss
I know you said you looked at Simile but that didn't get you where you
wanted to go, right? Do you have any sketches of what your ideal
visualization would look like and how it might work? Not talking mechanics,
just visually what you would want to see?
Sorry I can't be of much help (yet!), as these are the same challenges we're
hoping to address with the Civil War Data 150 project. We're still at the
information gathering process, not even to data import and modeling yet, but
if all goes as planned, we'll be experimenting with visualization options in
the fall.
It's great to throw this stuff out there though, as we need to start finding
and showing these kinds of visualizations that will really make clear the
usefulness of Linked Data. And unless we can create tools that
non-programmers can use, widespread adaptation will remain a ways out.
Jon
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Aaron Rubinstein
I don't know of anything that can create attractive visualizations from
RDF/Linked Data 'out-of-the-box.'
The closest you are likely to get is Rhizomik's RDF2SVG service,
http://rhizomik.net/html/redefer/rdf2svg-form/.
For more complex and attractive visualizations, Processing is the way to
go, http://processing.org/. You have to code these yourself but the
sky's the limit. It's also based on Java so it's likely that you can
use Java RDF libraries in your Processing code.
Hope this helps,
Aaron
On 4/9/2010 10:59 PM, Hillel Arnold wrote:
> Hi Everybody,
>
> I wanted to introduce you to something I've been thinking about for a
> while now, and would like to start working on more seriously. Last
> year I was involved in a project to survey and describe archival
> collections pertaining to the Asian and Pacific American communities
> in the NYC metropolitan area.
>
> My colleagues and I quickly realized that, as with any community,
> there was a complex web of relationships at play that determined which
> groups and individuals were friendly and which weren't. We also
> realized that this valuable information wasn't recorded anywhere.
> Lacking a better idea, we started putting these relationships into a
> spreadsheet, and I created a very rudimentary graph using Many Eyes.
> You can see the results on the home page of the project's website:
> http://dlibdev.nyu.edu/tamimentapa/
>
> However, I was never satisfied with this visualization because it
> doesn't give you a good enough sense of who/what the individuals/
> organizations are or the nature of the relationship(s) between them.
>
> I�d like to develop something that gives users more detail on the
> nodes (possibly pulling from the information from the survey
> descriptions and/or other places) as well as the arcs (I�m thinking of
> using the Relationship vocabulary to do this http://vocab.org/relationship/.html).
> I�m fairly comfortable with modeling this data in RDF. Where I need
> some guidance/help is in developing the visualization itself. I�m not
> really a programmer, so my skills are a little lacking in this area.
> I�ve looked for other examples of what I�d like to do, but nothing
> I�ve seen really encompasses all the elements of what I�d like to do.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions of visualizations that approximate
> what I�ve described, or other suggestions of how I might piece this
> together?
>
> Thanks,
> Hillel
>
>
Hillel Arnold
Thanks a lot for your advice. I'm going to play around with Processing
and see what I can come up with. I'll post back here if I manage to
come up with anything close to interesting.
Hillel
>> I’d like to develop something that gives users more detail on the
>> nodes (possibly pulling from the information from the survey
>> descriptions and/or other places) as well as the arcs (I’m thinking of
>> using the Relationship vocabulary to do this
>> http://vocab.org/relationship/.html).
>> I’m fairly comfortable with modeling this data in RDF. Where I need
>> some guidance/help is in developing the visualization itself. I’m not
>> really a programmer, so my skills are a little lacking in this area.
>> I’ve looked for other examples of what I’d like to do, but nothing
>> I’ve seen really encompasses all the elements of what I’d like to do.
>>
>> Does anyone have any suggestions of visualizations that approximate
>> what I’ve described, or other suggestions of how I might piece this
>> together?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Hillel
>>
>>
>
>