Moving Networks and Airplane Path Visualizations
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/plane-viz/
In this News Article describing a day of airline traffic it is reminding us how complex our daily air paths are. Data visualizations today have become an easy way to analyze and see large amounts of data in an easily comprehended way. Before we had the technology to track this information but not to show all of this information in an easy way to see all the links and major hubs of for airlines with the amount of detail we have now. This is a new way to view this data not as dots on maps, but as the actual moving network that it actually is. The visualization also shows us how busy the skies above us truly are without our realizing of what is going on.
Airplane paths in this context are the perfect example of a moving network different from the static network we see with friend groups. There are links between two place, or paths of more than two places with different lengths of paths depending on the flight time and the nodes are the cities to and from which the planes are going. The structure of the network visualization highlights the busiest places and most popular paths, which can tell us a lot about the network. This is also a directed graph because if a plane goes one way it does not mean that it also goes back to where it started the same way and is often the case that it takes a different route making more of a circular path than linear one. This is a valuable way to look at networks as ever changing and moving. It is rare to find a completely static network in the real world. Airplane networks can be viewed as static if you were to pause the video at a specific time to analyze a snapshot in the time lapse, but watching the planes move in the video creates a completely different user experience.
Analyzing the network can show concepts of strong triadic closure and balanced graphs that the more a path is traveled in a certain sequence the more likely that sequence is to be consistently followed. For example if the path from Denver to New York and New York to Frankfurt is a frequently traveled path the video will show the path as a brighter line and we can assume that the path has a strong triadic closure balance is likely to be traveled again. The more time the path is traveled the stronger the tie and more likely it is a frequently flown path. We can learn a lot about airlines paths, popular destinations, and ties between places by simply watching the video and seeing where flights are likely to go and how frequently they fly. If the path is flown we know the plane has people on it because airlines don’t send empty flights because that is a loss of money and therefor can come to conclusions about human behavior and traveling tendencies.