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World system visualization by Carl Nordlund 28 July 2002 01:22 UTC |
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Hello
wsn:ers,
A
nifty thing FYI: have a look at selected parts of the world system as of
1995:
Nevermind all the text at the beginning - go to the java applet at the
bottom and click 'start' to activate the program. Hold down left mousebutton and
drag to rotate the view. Click an individual node to get further data for that
node.
The
visualization is done through a spring-embedder in which a matrix of trade flows
between (all) pairs of 26 countries (1995 trade data) is translated into
theoretical springs of lengths corresponding to the raw trade data. The system
then tries to find an optimal placement of these actors.
Spring-embedders are a common technique for visualizing structural data
but I believe it's a novel approach to use a closed-space scenario (the surface
of a sphere is a closed 2-dimensional space), thus making it easier to actually
be able to see non-core subgroups (such as the scandinavian countries and the
Malaysia-Singapore connection). For this set of data, one really needs a
26-dimensional space in order to do an accurate visualization but it seems
apparent that spring-embedding mehods can be used to extract and visualize the
dominating features of structures, such as the world system structure for these
core/semiperipheral national economies as of 1995. (My program gets
unstable when tension increases too much but the optimal visualization is
actually just before this happens, so increase the distance scaling as much as
possible after an equilibrium has been reached).
Yours,
Carl
----- Carl Nordlund, BA, PhD student carl.nordlund(at)humecol.lu.se Human Ecology Division www.humecol.lu.se |
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