Visual Complexity Quotes

“But mapping time in any network, as computer scientist Chaomei Chen recognizes, "is one of the toughest challenges for research in information technology....[It is] technically challenging as well as conceptually complex." Due to the extremely demanding nature of charting the passage of time within a network, most scientists and designers feel apprehensive about incorporating this dimension in many of their executions, which in part explains the lack of projects in this realm. There is no doubt that when we embrace time, the difficulty of the task at hand increases tenfold, but if visualization is to become a fundamental tool in network discovery, it needs make this substantial jump. Most networked systems are affected by the natural progression of time, and their depiction is never complete unless the critical dimension becomes part of the equation.”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“If we consider the vast hidden networks that sustain our biosphere, we can truly understand how critical the dimension of time really is. After all, it is the particularly dynamic nature of interconnecting ecosystems around the world that poses the one of the most difficult challenges to our enduring effort to understand the intricacies of our planet. Even something seemingly as stable as the human brain is continuously adding or removing synapses-the connections between neurons-in a process associated with cognitive learning. Not to mention the internet, with its constant flux of information and vast landscape of servers, frequently adds or disconnects machines from the network. And time analysis does not only cover historical evolution; it equally applies to real-time dynamics and oscillations.”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“Networks are evolving systems, constantly mutating and adapting. As physicists Mark Newman, Albert-Lazslo Barabasi, and Duncan J. Watts explain, "Many networks are the product of dynamical processes that add or remove vertices or edges....The ties people make affect the form of the network, and the form of the network affects the ties people make. Social network structure therefore evolves in a historically dependent manner, in which the role of the participants and the patterns of behavior they follow cannot be ignored." In some cases, the changes do not take weeks or months, but minutes or hours. And it is not only the network that adapts; whatever is being exchanged within the system also fluctuates over time (e.g., information, energy, water, a virus).”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“While there are millions of information-embedded web pages online, they are, in most cases, unable to automatically extract knowledge from their inherent interconnections. A single neuron is insignificant, but as it communicates with thousands of neighbors through synapses, it suddenly becomes part of a whole, much bigger than the sum of its parts. This whole keeps changing over time by the addition and deletion of nodes, increasing or decreasing the strength of their connections, in order constantly adapt to human experience and new learning requirements. It is through this process that the brain retrieves an old memory, analyzes the thread of a sudden event, or composes an argument for a particular idea. This is the level of malleability, commonly called neuroplasticity, that the web is expected to develop in the next few years or decades.”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“This much needed transformation will have to acknowledge the city as a living organism in constant mutation, a highly complex network involving a vast number of variables. It will have to conceive the city as an open space bursting with overlap and spontaneity, where the natural conditions for creativity, recreation, and cooperation can easily prosper. This will only happen if we stop imposing artificial barriers on our spaces and truly embrace the diverse social nature of man.”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“Alexander is extremely forthright about the consequences of this fragmentation: "In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide." As Alexander clearly implies, human beings do not naturally comply with this highly compartmentalized modus operandi. Our connections, among ourselves and with the surrounding environment, do not follow this type of conceptual order and simplicity. We are ambiguous, complex, and idiosyncratic. "The reality of today's social structure is thick with overlap-the systems of friends and acquaintances form a semilattice, not a tree," state Alexander on the convergent nature of social groups. He is convinced that the reductionist conception of urban spaces, typical of a tree organization, blinds our judgment of the city and limits the problem-solving abilities of many planners and system analysts.”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“Joachim opposed many religious dogmas and was a firm believer in a more liberal church. He envisioned a new age in which mankind would reach total freedom and the hierarchy of the Church would become unnecessary under the rule of the Order of the Just, an alliance between Christians, Jews, and Muslims.”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“The origin of the word knowledge itself is strongly tied to trees. "In the Germanic languages, most terms for learning, knowledge, wisdom, and so on are derived from the words for tree or wood," says Hageneder. "In Anglo Saxon we have witan (mind, consciousness) and witige (wisdom); in English, 'wits,' 'witch', and wizard'; and in modern German, Witz (wits, joke). These words all stem from the ancient Scandinavian root word vid, which means 'wood' (as in forest, not timber).”
― Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information