Circles of Influence: Visualizing Creative Debt Across Time

What 48 hours of sleeplessness have to do with Kafka’s influence on Lemony Snicket.

UPDATE: The flowchart is now up on Etsy as an 11×14 high-quality digital print on matte paper, with over 50% of proceeds going to support Longshot! (Behold the first-ever exclamation point in Brain Pickings’ six-year history, that’s how excited I am.)

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of partaking in Longshot Magazine, a brilliant grassroots collaborative project enlisting some of the country’s top publishing talent — writers, editors, art directors, designers, photographers, radio producers — and unreasonable amounts of coffee to put together — write, edit, lay out, publish and distribute — a full-fledged magazine in 48 hours. Those of us who have worked in the traditional magazine industry, with its two-month publishing cycles and massive budgets, instantly get the utter insanity and audaciousness of what’s indeed a long shot of the most daring kind. (Not in the least alleviated by the fact that, besides the print magazine, we also have a beautiful website and a radio station with behind-the-scences stories and featurettes, produced by the crew at WNYC’s Radiolab.)

This issue’s theme was Debt and, in the spirit of combinatorial creativity, I collaborated with Michelle Legro of the wonderful Laphams Quarterly and illustrator-extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton on Circles of Influence — a visualization of literary, scientific and artistic influences. It’s designed to illustrate the enormous creative indebtedness that permeates humanity’s proudest intellectual output, while also demonstrating the cross-pollination of disciplines across science, art, literature, film and music. While some of the connections might be more obvious (Shakespeare to Victor Hugo? But of course!), others (Marie Curie to J. J. Abrams?) may require some thinking, some Googling, and some general neuron-flexing — and that’s the point, to challenge you to examine how these creators might have influenced each other, tickling your curiosity with the urge to look something up, learn something new, and end up more attuned to creative cross-pollination as an agent of intellectual progress. (And, of course, a timely wink at Google Circles.)

For more on the thought and creative process behind Circles of Influence, catch Michelle, Wendy and myself talking about it in this Longshot Radio interview.

Longshot is the brainchild of my dear friend and freelance rockstar-writer Sarah Rich, Mat Honan, senior editor at Gizmodo and former Wired staffer, and Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, also a Wired alum.

Longshot, like Brain Pickings, relies on the pay-what-you-will model, so be sure to chip in if you find any delight and illumination in the 42 wonderful stories and, better yet, grab an actual print puppy for just $12.

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Digital Decluttering: 3 Ways to Visualize Your Mac’s Hard Drive

How to spot RAM offenders, or what data visualization has to do with the workings of your second brain.

Our hard drives are our satellite brains, vital extensions of our intellectual and creative input and output. But our informationally voracious habits also mean that our second brains get inevitably overwhelmed, slowing down and spasming under the weight of our tastes and interests. To combat the issue, here are three fantastic visualization tools — playing on today’s running theme of data visualization — that help declutter your hard drive without requiring any programming knowledge, visually track down what takes the most space and memory, and allowing you to optimize accordingly.

GRAND PERSPECTIVE

GrandPerspective is a Mac OSX utility for graphically showing the file disk usage on your computer using tree map visualizations. It developed by Erwin Bonsma and is released for free as open-source under the GNU General Public License. You can support the project with a donation.

Direct download link.

DAISY DISK

DaisyDisk scans your hard drive, as well as any external drives you have mounted, and visualizes the contents as interactive maps, allowing you to easily spot unusually large files and delete or move them to an external hard drive to get more free space. The program’s scanning engine is surprisingly fast even with drives as large as several terabytes. You can get a copy for the rather reasonable $19.99.

Free demo direct download link

via Swiss Miss

DISK INVENTORY X

Disk Inventory X, developed by Tjark Derlien, is very similar to GrandPerspective — same tree map visualizations, also a free download and under a GPL license, also supported by donations — though with a slightly different and more intuitive interface. It was inspired by WinDirStat, the hard drive visualization utility for Windows.

Direct download link

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Visualize This: How to Tell Stories with Data

How to turn numbers into stories, or what pattern-recognition has to do with the evolution of journalism.

Data visualization is a frequent fixation around here and, just recently, we looked at 7 essential books that explore the discipline’s capacity for creative storytelling. Today, a highly anticipated new book joins their ranks — Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics, penned by Nathan Yau of the fantastic FlowingData blog. (Which also makes this a fine addition to our running list of blog-turned-book success stories.) Yu offers a practical guide to creating data graphics that mean something, that captivate and illuminate and tell stories of what matters — a pinnacle of the discipline’s sensemaking potential in a world of ever-increasing information overload.

And in a culture of equally increasing infographics overload, where we are constantly bombarded with mediocre graphics that lack context and provide little actionable insight, Yau makes a special point of separating the signal from the noise and equipping you with the tools to not only create better data graphics but also be a more educated consumer and critic of the discipline.

From asking the right questions to exploring data through the visual metaphors that make the most sense to seeing data in new ways and gleaning from it the stories that beg to be told, the book offers a brilliant blueprint to practical eloquence in this emerging visual language.

On the book’s companion site, you can find downloadable data files, interactive examples of how visualization works and, if you’re technically inclined, even code samples to use as the basis for your own visual experimentation.

Visually stimulating, intellectually illuminating and creatively compelling, Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics is equal parts practical vocabulary for an essential modern language and conceptual testament to the power of data visualization as a new form of journalism and a powerful storytelling medium.

For a historical perspective on infographics, be sure to see the story of Otto Neurath’s Isotype.

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