Three years ago, my friend Robert Harris{:} and I made a toy project to help some of our friends who were teaching in the humanities. They wanted ways to help their students understand who was connected to who. Being data visualization nerds, we wanted that too! We added connection lines and put people on a timeline in order to visually sift through who influenced who, and who were contemporaries.
We called our project TSOMI, which stands for The Sphere of My Influence. It’s ready for others now thanks to Cloud City’s help with design and refactoring.
In this project, we present these influence relationships as they are cataloged in DBpedia. The DBpedia project{:} is an attempt to organize and catalog the unstructured and semi-structured information presented in Wikipedia. We use React to provide our user interface, and D3 to draw and animate the relationships as our users navigate from one focused person to the next.
We’d love your help! There are still things that need doing and you, YES YOU! are welcome to add to or fork the project — in fact, we want you to!
“Hello world!” love TSOMI.
Project: http://tsomi.cloudcity.io/{:}
Source Code: https://github.com/cloudcity/tsomi{:}
Please email with thoughts and suggestions. stephanie@cloudcity.io
“A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.” - Italo Calvino