Recently I went down the rabbit hole of recursive tree maps. Walk a file system directory and assign a weight (size) to each directory recursively. Then present a tree map of each level. Click on "Users" then "fred", then "clones" for example.
Looking at this and seeing "lens" and "prisms" is at once both familiar and extremely odd. These Mondrian shapes are just like my recursive tree maps. Familiar. But the concept of lens and prism is not at all how I thought of them as I was repeatedly generating them.
It was interesting to look at what I was doing from a more formal perspective. Thanks! Yet at the same time I wish I could understand a practical use for this. How would it make things any better in my visual representation to use these concepts?
Personally, I find the whole idea of presenting a visual representation of masses of data interesting. There was a challenge a while back about how to represent the entire catalog of ISBN for example:
Looking at this and seeing "lens" and "prisms" is at once both familiar and extremely odd. These Mondrian shapes are just like my recursive tree maps. Familiar. But the concept of lens and prism is not at all how I thought of them as I was repeatedly generating them.
It was interesting to look at what I was doing from a more formal perspective. Thanks! Yet at the same time I wish I could understand a practical use for this. How would it make things any better in my visual representation to use these concepts?
Personally, I find the whole idea of presenting a visual representation of masses of data interesting. There was a challenge a while back about how to represent the entire catalog of ISBN for example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838