I recently came across a post on O’Reilly that highlighted Christopher Warnow’s network visualization for the book A Thousand Milieus. Warnow created a tool using Processing, based on the Gephi API, that retrieves the Amazon recommendation network for a book. You can download the tool, input your own book and visualize the recommendation network. The tool allows you to export the network as a PDF which unfortunately was, in my case, absolutely unreadable so I took a few hours to adjust the readability in Illustrator. It would be even nicer if you could export the network as a Gephi file for direct manipulation.

With the tool I created the Amazon recommendation network for “Software Studies: A Lexicon” (see also my review of the book). The network could not only serve as a “what to read next” within the field but it also shows a couple of interesting clusters aligned to different strands within Software Studies or fields aligned with Software Studies.

Download hi-res PDFs to explore the full map: Amazon recommendation network for “Software Studies: A Lexicon” (PDF) & Color-coded clusters within the Amazon recommendation network for “Software Studies: A Lexicon” (PDF)

Thanks to Christopher Warnow’s effort to create this wonderful tool!