Culturegraphy

Culturegraphy visualizes the exchange of cultural information over time. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development such as that seen in movie references. All findings reported in this article were made through a process that involved network scientists, a media theorist and a sociologist; the role that visualization can play in bridging scientific communities was central to this work. The visualizations were in fact the result of a process to bring researchers from different disciplines together. While traditionally physicists have used different methods than those used by media theorists or sociologists, physicists are increasingly asking questions similar to those asked by media theorists or sociologists as they study the dynamics in networks. Visualization can serve as a common language that brings fields together and identifies the differences between them but that also has its own idiosyncratic views.