Network Analysis with Palladio
What Palladio does
Palladio is a site designed to read historical data afresh, this time in visual form. Born out of Stanford University’s Republic of Letters project, which translated 17th– and 18th-century written correspondence into maps and graphs, in order to mark the routes along which Enlightenment ideas traveled, Palladio offers four new “views” for old data. The first and second of these, maps and graphs, reveal networks that were latent in the data. In the case of maps, data must include longitude and latitude coordinates; while for the graphs view, the imagery is abstract yet interactive—a constellation of recognizable spots, lines and labels. Palladio’s third interface returns us to the data in their traditional form. In tables, a spreadsheet lets us add and subtract potential “dimensions” or “nodes” from the list eligible for selection in maps and graphs. The gallery view, finally, shows thumbnails of the database’s contents, absent networking lines or spreadsheet format. In combination, Palladio’s tools can expose a variety of patterns and relationships between one or two strands of data that standard spreadsheets obscure.
How Palladio works
Palladio’s interface is remarkably simple, at least at the start. To begin, users must upload data in the form of one or more csv or spreadsheet files. Having supplied the data, they can turn to any of the four views discussed above. In the case of the map, click on “new layer” and determine whether or to create a network between points (point to point). A “tooltip label” allows us to choose which of the imported metadata to include on the map, e.g. place names. “Size points” and “according to” options allow us to use further metadata to rank the sites by size, according to whichever criteria we choose. The more PhDs a town has the larger its mark, or dot, or the other way around. And the rest is up to us. Palladio permits us to zoom in and out at will, and even to drag sources and targets from one part of the graph to another. But inferences from the networks are the user’s to draw.
The graph view draws its networks based not on location but on source and target. Users choose from the potential “nodes” included in their data, and again, as in the case of maps, can “size” the nodes for the sake of comparison. We can also “highlight” a source or target to differentiate it from the other. Finally, the “show links” box allows us to display or remove the lines that link sources to targets. The table or list view invites us to add or subtract rows and columns (dimensions) from the ones included in the data, and the gallery allows us to add metadata to images—including URLs to provide direct links between Palladio and the wider web.
