

"Visualizing Facebook Friends" was created using R - TalGalili
http://www.r-bloggers.com/visualizing-facebook-friends-eye-candy-in-r/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+RBloggers+(R+bloggers)

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rflrob
I, for one, would love to see the drawing code, even if it's totally data
free. Nothing else I see on the R Graph Gallery
(<http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php>) looks remotely as good as
the fb graph, and sharing code like this is a great way to promote the
language.

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arvinjoar
'I created an ordering based on the length of the lines, so that longer lines
were drawn “behind” the shorter, more local lines. Then I used
colorRampPalette() to generate a color palette from black to blue to white,
and colored the lines according to order they were drawn.'

If I am understanding this correctly (I'm probably not), longer lines would
never be as bright as short lines. Why? Let's say hypothetically, that all
Bostonians had at least 10 friends in Madrid, then wouldn't we want to see
that as a white line on the chart? Please correct me if I am wrong.

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rlivsey
He addresses that in the paragraph before:

    
    
      My first attempt at plotting the data involved plotting 
      very transparent lines. Unfortunately there was just too
      much data to get a meaningful plot — even at very low 
      opacity, there were enough lines to make the entire 
      image just a bright blob.

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sthatipamala
R seems pretty amazing. Any suggestions on how to go about learning it?

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tommi
I can't imagine why the regular route of learning would not work with every
language: wet your appetite with tutorials and then do a small project with it
to grasp it better.

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invisiblefunnel
original post: <http://paulbutler.org/archives/visualizing-facebook-friends/>

