I chose to explore “Inventing Abstraction” because when I opened the link, the interactive design immediately caught my eye. Unlike a traditional article or “fixed” timeline, this project presents a dynamic and engaging network visualization that shows the connections between key people in the development of abstraction. The nodes in this visualization represent various artists, writers, poets, thinkers, or composers that played crucial roles in the shaping of abstraction as an artistic movement. These nodes are connected by edges/lines which represent the relationships between different individuals such as direct influences, mentors, collaborations, or just knowing each other.
One of the first things I noticed was that some nodes were larger and displayed in orange instead of the standard black and white. I found that this difference highlighted particularly influential people in this movement. These people had a much larger and more significant impact on the invention of abstraction. By emphasizing these individuals, it allows the project to visually convey the scale of influence of individuals within the movement of inventing abstraction, which helps the audience to quickly identify who had a major impact and who’s impacts were more minimal.
One aspect of Inventing Abstraction that really caught my attention was its high level of interactivity and user engagement. Unlike mindlessly reading an article, this project allows users to actively engage with the material presented by choosing which specific interactions to further explore. When a user clicks on a specific node, it filters the data to only show the specific relationships associated with that one person, making it much easier to see their own impact within the whole “web” of abstraction. When a node is clicked, a brief biography of that person appears, which is very helpful as it provides context about their significance and contributions to the shaping of abstraction. This was very helpful as I was fairly unfamiliar with many of these individuals, but by reading these brief biographies, I was able to gain some information about them without having to do separate research.
I also found that having this interactive network was far more useful as it would be able to reveal patterns that may not be as easy to find in a traditional text article. The network also allows the audience to see how this movement of abstraction was a collective and intertwined effort instead of individuals working alone. This projects interactive nature made it far more interesting and easier to learn about this period of time than by just reading about this in a news article.
