Words | Michele Pasin

2026

Sep 2026

I recently read Norman Lewis's Naples '44, and it stayed with me more than most books do.

blog Five new ways to visualize Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Aug 2026

I've spent a bit more time this year on Wittgensteiniana, my long-running side project that turns Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into a set of experimental visualizations. Five of them are worth writing up properly: Depth-Rhythm, Silence Spiral, Heartbeat Strip, The Ladder, and Concept Web.

2023

blog Designing great dashboards: a slidedeck

Jul 2023

What makes a dashboard great? Here is a slide deck (gslides )that consolidates several useful ideas I've ran into in the past.

2022

blog Ontospy version 2.0 released

Oct 2022

Version 2 of the library includes SHACL support as well as various internal refactoring. Ontospy is an open source Python library and command line tool for working with vocabularies encoded in the RDF family of languages.

blog Bringing quotations back to life

Jul 2022

There's a new section on this site that allows to navigate quotations: quotes.michelepasin.org. It's just a cut-down implementation of an old idea I worked on a while ago, but you know.. sometimes it is useful to start from scratch and re-think things from the ground up.

blog Three things I do *not* like about Looker

Apr 2022

Following up on my previous 3 things I like about Looker , here are instead the top three things that I really wish were different about this piece of software.

blog Three things I like about Looker

Mar 2022

Looker is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that was recently acquired by Google. After nearly 6 months of using Looker for building dashboards and visual analytics, here are the top 3 things I like about this platform.

2020

blog More Jupyter notebooks: pyvis and networkx

Aug 2020

Lately I've been spending more time creating Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how to use the Dimensions API for research analytics. In this post I'll talk a little bit about two cool Python libraries I've recently discovered for working with graph data: pyvis and networkx.

blog Calculating Industry Collaborations via GRID

Jan 2020

A new tutorial demonstrating how to extract and visualize data about industry collaborations by combining Dimensions data with GRID.

2019

blog Zero Hunger Hack Day: surfacing research about the Sustainable Development Goals program

Feb 2019

This post is about a little dashboard idea that aims at helping policy makers discover research relevant to the 'zero hunger' topic, one of the themes of the Sustainable Development Goals program.

2017

blog Exploring SciGraph data using JSON-LD, Elastic Search and Kibana

Apr 2017

Hello there data lovers! In this post you can find some information on how to download and make some sense of the scholarly dataset recently made available by the Springer Nature SciGraph project, by using the freely available Elasticsearch suite of software.

2016

blog Nature.com Subjects Stream Graph

Jan 2016

The nature.com subjects stream graph displays the distribution of content across the subject areas covered by the nature.com portal.

2015

blog Another experiment with Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Sep 2015

I spent some time hacking over the weekend, and here's the result: a minimalist interactive version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

blog A sneak peek at Nature.com articles' archive

Jun 2015

We're getting closer to releasing the full set of metadata covering over one million articles published by Nature Publishing Group since 1845. So here's a sneak peek at this dataset, in the form of a simple D3.js visual summary of what will soon be available to download and reuse.

2014

blog How to visualize a big taxonomy within a single webpage?

Aug 2014

Here are a couple more experiments aimed at visually representing a large taxonomy.

2013

blog Messing around wih D3.js and hierarchical data

Jun 2013

These days there are a lot of browser-oriented visualization toolkits, such d3.js or jit.js. They're great and easy to use, but how much do they scale when used with medium-large or very large datasets?

2012

blog Infographics Course, Week 2

Nov 2012

Here are the materials related to the second week of the Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization online course. This week we talked about two topics: a) Visual Perception and Graphic Design Principles and b) Planning for Infographics and Visualizations. The exercise focused on an interactive visualization available on the New York Times website.

blog Infographics Course, Week 1

Nov 2012

This is a short summary of the activities in week 1 of the Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization massive online course offered by the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas. I'll be posting the course materials and exercises here on the blog, so stay tuned if you want more.

blog Navigating through the people of medieval Scotland... one step at a time

Sep 2012

Navigating through the people of medieval Scotland... one step at a time! This is, in a nutshell, what users can do via the Dynamic Connections Cloud application, a prototype tool I've been working on recently, in the context of the People of Medieval Scotland project (PoMS), which was launched last week at the University of Glasgow.

blog Wittgenstein Tractatus and the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

Jul 2012

What do the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein have in common? Definitely not much, at first sight. But the moment you realize that Wittgenstein was so fascinated with logic that he wanted to organize his masterwork in the form of a tree structure, you may change your mind.

blog Crowdsourcing interpretation with Prism, a new software from the Scholar's Lab

Jun 2012

Prism is a new online tool by the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia. In a nutshell, Prism lets users independently highlight and annotate passages from a text, then mashes up all of these highlights into a new version of the text where the 'importance' of certain passages is rendered graphically via colors and font sizes.

2011

blog Using Impromptu to visualize RSS feeds

Dec 2011

Some time ago, I was experimenting with the processing and display of RSS feeds within Impromptu, and as a result, I built a small app that retrieves the news feed from The Guardian online and displays it on a canvas. I've had a bit of free time these days, so last night I thought it was time to polish it a little and make it available on this blog (who knows, maybe someone else will use it as a starting point for another project).

2010

blog Mapping stereotypes

Sep 2010

Sometimes a picture is more eloquent than a thousand words. Well, a map can be too, and the maps by Yanko Tsvetkov proved the point for me. Mapping stereotypes is a project in which he plots on a european map the way we (as British, French, Italians etc...) see the 'others'. The funny bit is that the pictures represent the most superficial, street-level, shallow views we have about our european neighbours...

2009

blog Graphics over code in Impromptu

Nov 2009

Andrew Sorensen posted some code in the Impromptu mailing list showing how to add graphics (and various other things) on top of a code 'image'.

blog Visualizing Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Oct 2009

Shameless self-plug: some time ago I made an alternative visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. No special reason, just because I wanted to do some experimentation with a text I was already working on.

blog UML to django

Oct 2009

Neat little project that will speed up your data modeling using django: think up an application model, formalize it by drawing a UML diagram using the freely available ArgoUML, and have it translated into django models automatically.

blog Django admin and MPTT #2

Aug 2009

This is a follow up to the previous post on managing and visualizing trees using django. I've been using MPTT quite a bit now and it's great - also, I looked deeper into the admin integration (basically, the issue of being able of manage trees from within the admin).

blog Visualizing Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, organ

Jun 2009

A classical piece from Bach, delivered in a rather unusual way.

blog The IBM glass engine

May 2009

The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

blog DB visualize : The Universal Database Tool

Mar 2009

I've been searching for something similar for a long time. Just hook up a database, and et voila you can see it, modify and export it with a clean and fast interface. Among the many (really a lot) features you have:

blog GAE SQL Designer

Mar 2009

GAE SQL designer is a simple app that allows you to Draw E-R designs, Edit tables and rows, Manage keys, Create relations (FK constraints), Save & Load designs and Import DB schemas. Finally - it's online and it's free!

blog MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections

Jan 2009

MIT student Anita Lillies shows off her project Music Box:

2006

blog A Cyberspace Atlas

Dec 2006

Wow half past ten Friday night, I had a paper to finish and now I feel like my eyes are getting lost into the screen... just a brief post to conclude the week. I got a REALLY cool link about visualization from Mark. Lots of classified projects, stuff which was not covered by more recent surveys because it's too old (but still very inspiring!)....

blog Let's visualize 'em

Oct 2006

Since I've got to annotate and reorganize a large set of text data, I guess I will have to visualize them too at some point. This part of the job is really exciting I must say. Somehow, I have a visual mind (whatever that means). So I had a look around to check what's around, see some examples and gather some inspiration. I found a great lot of interesting material on visualization here, and I'll keep looking for interesting sources. Please leave a comment if there's something I should be aware of!! Of course, what's of interest is mainly visualizing documents, but not only. The following list is just a very little taste of what visualization can do. I'm amazed by the quantity of projects existing out there... ! Two other interesting links are the Information Visualization Community wiki, and Visual Complexity. TEXTARC