Networks and Beauty

Pajek is a program that is very useful when you want to visualize a large network, and analyze the topology of these large networks, it can display networks with thousand lines and vertices. Pajek is used in a wide range of disciplines like: computer networks, transportation networks, social networks etc. The advantage of Pajek above other network algorithms is that it is less space and time consuming. Six different data structures can be implemented in the algorithm: network, permutation, vector, cluster, partition and hierarchy. In this Lab, I created two different visualization. The first one is a protein network (figure 16). The data was provided by the teachers of this course. The second visualization is about connections between airports in the USA. Data for this network was downloaded from: http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/data/

The degree of connectivity in both networks are displayed by differences in node size. Both networks show a heavy tailed distribution for connectivity, so there are much more less connected things than well connected things . As mentioned in the part about head/tail breaks this deeper scaling structure can be sensed as beautiful  (Jiang & Sui, 2014).  There are several examples of beautiful things that show this deeper scaling structure: the human body, a painting of Jackson Pollock, classic music etc. This new way of thinking is different from: ''Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder'', which explains beauty in a subjective way. The new way of thinking handles beauty objectively. 

     Figure 16 . Visualization of protein network 
    Figure 17. Visualization of Airport network


Batagelj, V. and Orvar, A. (2006) Pajek datasets. Vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si: http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/data/, retrieved November 19, 2015.

Jiang, B., & Sui, D. Z. (2014). A new kind of beauty out of the underlying scaling of geographic space. The Professional Geographer66(4), 676-686.