But is there really one “visualization community”? I’m involved in visualization and know many of the folks on this map, and it looks like a pretty good map to me, but it seems to skew heavily toward the design, art, and infographics world. That’s probably because of the seed accounts chosen, and this chart misses a number of folks coming at visualization from the open government, journalism, and academic points of view. It also certainly excludes many prominent visualizers who don’t use Twitter. This is a universal problem: a visualization must either include or exclude each node; it’s a binary, black-and-white sort of decision process about a fixed set of nodes drawn from available data, but reality isn’t like that. Real communities are porous and overlapping and span multiple communication networks.
Dim Sum Digital 