How Important is Hegel?!
I was surprised I hadn't seen this graphic at Drunks and Lampposts made with Gephi until a friend posted it on facebook last week. The original is here, and here's my version:
Using a scrape of the data behind wikipedia's sidebar for philosophers, Simon Rapier put together a fantastic visualization of the schools and interconnections among philosophers. Griffsgraphs followed up by expanding the scrape to the entire network of influencers and influenced on wikipedia. Both of these are insightful humanities studies in graphs and visualization---even though the algorithm wasn't told which common ideas link Hegel and Marx, it saw that they were similar enough to be grouped together (shown by making them the same color), and that the way Hegel influenced, say, Husserl, was different enough to warrant another school, simply by observing a different group of people followed them.
That's a solid aggregation of a lot of humanities information. Who knew Skynet's tweed jacket had patches on the elbows?
However, looking at the original graphs on D&L and Griffs, I was struck that...
