The Overlaps between Mathematical Fields

The interactive visualization can be viewed here.

This visualization comes from a dataset that compiles the number of papers that were published in two fields of mathematics on arxiv.org between 2004 and 2008.

The opening image displays all of the connections between all of the fields. Mathematical subjects are represented by circles whose diameters correspond to the relative number of papers associated with each field. This number is also displayed underneath the circle, followed by the name of the subject. The arcs above display the number of papers between pairs of fields, with a thicker line corresponding to a higher number of papers.

Additionally, users can click on a circle to focus the visualization on that specific field. In this case, only the arcs corresponding with the selected field are shown, and the numbers underneath other circles change to indicate the number of collaborative papers. Clicking on the highlighted field a second time resets the visualization to its original state.

In this piece, I wanted to focus on creating a visualization optimized for web performance. In constraining myself to a screen medium, I had to navigate issues of data density and on-screen text legibility. Sorting the data in a meaningful way also pushed me further into the world of Java, namely implementing collections. User-interactivity is a powerful tool, and I tried to make the interactive component meaningful and useful, as opposed to simply novel.

Files used for this visualization include:
Primary Processing Sketch
Index Class
MathFields Class
Original .csv File