The Interactive Visualizations are standards compliant, but not all browsers are. We are relying on the Sigma.js framework to display network visualizations. This library loads networks from an XML (gexf) file and displays them on a canvas object. Since the library’s release, however, XML parsing has not worked correctly on Internet Explorer. While this browser is a decreasing part of the market, we want to support it and have therefore written a new import plugin. We now parse the XML file to JSON first and simply load this JSON file. This has made the file size smaller, the load time faster, and increased compatibility to work with Internet Explorer as well as other major browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari). We’d particularly welcome feedback from Internet Explorer users on the visualizations — please remember to let us know your browser version. For users already using Sigma, code for the new JSON parser is available in the OII branch of the project. Simply run gexf2json.py on a gexf file and then load the results through the new paseJson plugin for Sigma. Code for the entire InteractiveVis project is also available on github.
The InteractiveVis project had a very successful demo session at the Internet, Politics, Policy Conference last week. We received a lot of interest and also some great feedback. We’re working to finish a web-interface / wizard to let anyone upload their own data and produce visualizations like these. Incorporating some of the helpful feedback received via the blog and email has put us a little behind on this, but it is now our top priority. I’ll update the blog with more details on the wizard soon.
