The visualization shown above is a ‘map’ of a conversation rendered by Pajek Social Network Analysis Software. The discussion was conducted by members of the Mac community soon after Microsoft released its Vista operating system.

Although there are less than 60 actual words in this picture, these words represent generalized concepts that have been distilled from a concordance of over 700 words. Most of these concepts were uttered multiple times during the course of the conversation and were connected to each other as words are connected in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.

For me, this picture is valuable, not only because it represents that conversation in a visual way, but because the tools are available to make this kind of visualization possible.