[HN Gopher] Displaying Content as a Graph
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Displaying Content as a Graph
Author : serverlessmom
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-01-01 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thisisimportant.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (thisisimportant.net)
| thom wrote:
| Just don't. There's no real use case where people need to
| perceive this graph. It's embarrassing to see the dreadful
| redesign of the C2 wiki shown here - the original wiki, no less!
| - which basically made it unusable. Hypertext is one of the most
| successful UI paradigms of all time, don't overthink it.
| thih9 wrote:
| I guess we're used to dealing with non-hierarchical data in real
| life. I have a shelf of books, some list of movies, and a stack
| of documents.
|
| Popular platforms are already prioritizing "recommended" views
| (as opposed to nested or hierarchical lists). With ai assistants
| and vr becoming more popular, I could see graph UIs following
| too.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| Graphs work really well for displaying relational data if you can
| get labels on all (or most) of the arrows and you can zoom in /
| change perspectives to see different relations between the same
| nodes.
|
| Graphs with unlabeled arrows can still be useful, but not without
| someone there walking you through what the arrows mean.
| Otherwise, when embedded in an article, they're not much more
| than stock imagery.
| aworks wrote:
| The article mentions Glenn McDonald's musical genre page
| (https://everynoise.com/, no longer refreshing with new Spotify
| data) as an example of a flexible graph-like exploration format,
| without being burdened by explicit connections.
|
| The author also has a thorough description of pros and cons of
| the general concept.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| The article ends with classifying the challenge as a UI problem
| and doesn't explore the underlying logical design which is not a
| UI problem.
|
| As the author identifies, a graph of all permutations is useless
| to a user.
|
| And, as the author identifies, a hierarchy provides some
| organization.
|
| Hierarchy and graphing are not equal. Hierarchy is a subset of
| graphing, where binary weight has been applied to the direction.
|
| For example, given the set [Foo,Bar], we get the graph with equal
| weights.
|
| Foo <---> Bar
|
| If we want a hierarchy, we give full weight to the edge:
|
| Foo ---> Bar
|
| Given a set and a graph with a weighted edge, we have a
| direction.
|
| The challenge is to dynamically weigh the edge. In reality, an
| edge with a binary weight is useless. For example,
|
| Foo <10%------90%> Bar
|
| is a more realistic weight, as in computer programming Foo Bar is
| almost always the intent, unless the intent is to search a
| `.Reverse()` method, in which case Bar Foo makes more sense and
| the most common weight is not valid.
|
| However, to the author's point, neither the programmer nor the
| user know the optimal direction between vertices to arrive at the
| ideal path. The challenge is to generate a state machine in which
| the weights are dynamically adjusted as the user navigates the
| graph, resulting in the optimal direction. The best we can do is
| to analyze the input of other users to generate weights. "Crowd-
| sourced" weights.
| tbwriting wrote:
| wikipedia! https://wikijumps.com
| Agraillo wrote:
| Wikipedia has categories that from what is perceived, should form
| a DAG (Direct Acyclic Graph). But very often they don't. I saw
| this with my own eyes when tried to implement "DagView" (a visual
| control trying to navigate DAGs similar to trees). So you keep
| opening sub-categories and one of them suddenly is a super-
| category noticed before. This indicated for me that despite the
| fact that DAGs have luxury of having many "parents" it doesn't
| make things easy in the heads of those who try to work with them.
| Probably our brains are not very good at dealing with non-
| hierarchical structures
| lmeyerov wrote:
| This is a great article and fun to see fundamental concepts get
| (re)discovered here!
|
| A perspective that we can generalize from the hierarchy
| discussion is to think about tool-for-the-job: what is the
| 'content' job, and what 'jobs' graphs will do? We think about
| this a lot as we work on problems like how to make it easy to
| explore 100,000X+ more relationships on screen than they're
| showing: https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry .
|
| First, what do graph visualizations do?
|
| - They let us see the relationships in data. The article
| discusses hierarchy. But there is also progression, root cause,
| scope, and basically any correlation/causation relationship ML/AI
| figures out.
|
| - They let us directly manipulate the nodes & edges, such as for
| drilling down, navigating, reclustering, etc.
|
| - A useful 'aha' is thinking of modern information visualization
| as trying to optimize some sort of time-to-insight through a
| sequence of visual interactions. So each view must be information
| dense for visually revealing certain insights, and make it easy
| to get to the next set of visual Q&A.
|
| - Ex: When the entities are the interesting thing wrt questions,
| being able to drill down into individual nodes/edges into great
| dedicated views becomes important, so graphs get to need to be
| multimodal. And if the relationship aspect is unimportant... then
| graph view hurts more than it helps.
|
| - From optimization perspective, it now makes sense to specialize
| for specific domains. Maybe what is needed is more of a small
| diagram, and not actually investigating a lot of relationships.
| Or a graph of subway stops, which has additional visual
| considerations. For a website, a sitemap navigation vs
| clickstream product analytics view would likewise need
|
| A good analogy is a map. Sometimes exploring Google Maps is
| great, and you drill into a business inspector sidebar or down to
| a street view. But other times, it's better to have the map
| embedded into Yelp.com restaurant entry when you just need a
| quick view of mapping information as part of some broader
| context. Or you don't care about that map at all and can skip it.
|
| Given all that.. it's interesting to revisit asking... what is
| the 'content' job to be solved? What kinds of content lean
| towards graph, and which don't?
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