This interactive network visualization sheds light on the complex relationship between the different countries in the Middle East. Anyone willing to understand the relationship between these countries can have a good overview of the political situation in the Middle East. This visualization focuses on four different relationship factors: ‘love’, ‘hate’ ,’good’, ’strained’. At a first glance, the visualization seems to be overcrowded and clumsy, but it also provides a lot of factors for drilling down and filtering.
Things I liked:
- Depicting the relationship with an interactive network graph is excellent.
- Filtering on the basis or Country or group which helps the audience to have a better understanding of the position of each country. Hovering or clicking on each country provides the filtering.
- Filtering on the basis of the relationship types.
- A short description pops up providing details of the relation between two countries when one country is selected and other is hovered upon.
- The use of different color and line type in depicting different relationships helps identify them easily when a particular country is selected.
Room for improvement:
- The visualization also distinguishes the entity based on whether it is a country or group. But the colors used for ‘Group’ and ‘Non-Muslim’ has little difference. Also, there are no means of filtering on basis of this. So, it becomes ambiguous.