Thoughts?

I have recent finished reading Umberto Eco's "Foucaults Pendulum". If you haven't read it, it's central them is the human desire to see agency and plans behind everything, our desire to impose pattern and conspiracy on nature. See also the work of Daniel Dennett I guess.

Perhaps Lombardi's work appeals because it resonates with this desire that Eco identified.

I have often wished for such a diagram for corporations or brand name ownership. Who owns whom, who spun off whom, etc. I enjoyed the micro-version of this idea for the music (entertainment?) companies that I saw posted on this blog many months ago.

Is there a particular set of technologies/software that works for the organization of such a project - aside from 4x6 cards, as Lombardi used - or are we in a "make do" mode with homegrown or glued together solutions?

-megan

Link Analysis has been around for awhile. There are software programs (Link Notebook) that deal with data in essentially the way that Lombardi. Try (http://www.intelcenter.com/linkanalysis.html) where a "map" of Al Qaeda has been produced.
Used primarily in Law enforcement and Counter-Terrorism tracking, they used information enetered into a database to graphically show relationships and interactions. There are many issues involved, not the least being the appearances of guilt that a graphic "connection" between two entities implies due to the limits of detail of the connection that can be displayed. E.g. two people meet, the content of the meeting is not known but if they are both connected to third person implicated in a scandal that meeting may be shown as part of the scandal. Your analysis is only a reliable as the information going into it.

This is old stuff called neural networks. Any serious mathematician has dabled with this.

Whoa boy... It's a shame this guy passed on in 2000. Just one more year and he would have had the biggest job of his life.