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Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, the authors argue that social structure, operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors, partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary.
Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its nature. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, the authors believe the flow of law clerks reflects a proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the natural Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), the authors used these nearly 20,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.
Using network analysis, these visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, the authors found the distribution of degrees is consistent with the power law distribution implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Drawing from the complex systems literature, these findings suggest federal judicial actors self-organize at positions of criticality, possibly through Yule's Law. In sum, if social structure matters then these results have significant implications for doctrinal phase transition and the evolution of the law.
Writing Without Words, by Stephanie Posavec is a series of striking visualizations exploring the differences in writing style between authors of various modern classics. The images shown here are a visualization of Part One from the book On the Road by Jack Kerouac. In this piece, entitled Literary Organism, each literary component was divided hierarchically into even smaller parts - Part, Chapters, Paragraphs, Sentences, and ultimately Words, the smallest branch in the diagram. Stephanie also created different colors to distinguish the eleven thematic categories she created for the entirety of On the Road. Some categories include: Social Events & Interaction, Travel, Work & Survival, and Character Sketches, among others.
This is how NOTCOT describes Stephanie's work:"The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac's literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec's approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces."
Over the course of 2007 and 2008, Dave Bowker has been conducting a series of experiments in the many ways of representing news and data. Some of these include experiments in subject areas such as reduction, visualisation, ranking and sorting, representation, abstract, graphic storytelling, infographics, motion typography, body language studies, and filtering of data, to name just a few.
The images shown here are from a study entitled Thursday, part of the One week of The Guardian series, where Dave Bowker took the news from one week of The Guardian newspaper and visually represented it as a series of static visualization experiments. Referring to the Thursday execution, this is what Dave said: "This visual was pretty much focused on the relationships created between headlines, authors, pages, and categories. I wanted to see how much of a mess the relationships could make if they were all surrounding one container (like the square graphs we drew as children, linking adjoining sides by straight lines to create beautiful symmetrical perspectives)".
The weight of the lines are proportionate to the word count of each story, radially aligned in the main circle, next to authors, pages and categories. The categories, such as Science, Society, Politics, Culture, among others, also define the different colors used in the diagram.
Overnewsed but uninformed is an extraordinary piece of information design in the form of a 20-page newspaper. Each page introduces a topic from world news that is explained in detail with the help of rich and innovative charts and text. These pages can also be used as posters.
Stefan Brautigam is critical of the current news landscape, where according to him, it's getting harder and harder for an audience to determine the authenticity of the news. With this project, Stefan wants to help users search for sources they can trust. The collection of diagrams describes processes, discloses ownership structures and dependencies within the companies involved in the processing, preparation and delivery of messages. It also allows for easy analysis of user data. The audience can now evaluate and categorize news based on real-life examples, such as the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis, in addition to having background information and analyses at their fingertips.
