The Diagrams of the Day

The list represents a partial collection of the 'Diagrams of the Day' that were posted on the #dataflow channel on irc.freenode.net over the last 2 years. The channel is dedicated to Graphical Programming Environments like PureData where «The Diagram is the Program (TM)». The Diagrams illustrate our compulsion to visually represent and organize information. Much like Dataflow programming, they can be elegant or tend to obfuscate the very connections they attempt to explicit.

Taken together, the dotd represent a semiotician's dream (or nightmare), expliciting the cultural specificity of the signs constituting the diagrams. On the 'architectonic' side, the enquiry can be even richer, when considering the intersections of writing and drawing, the sliding scale between chart and diagram, 2D vs 3D, intentional and inadvertent diagrams as well as static and animated diagrams. Some dotd can actually serve as keys to organize the collection [1][2]. Another interesting diagram that illustrates the relations between users over a few days was produced by 'yard' and posted on Sep 22nd 2007 [3].

The subject matter spans programming, engineering, art, commerce, humour, politics, communication, history and 'rl'. The Diagrams reveal how ironic, cynical, precise, sensitive, awed, curious, informed, fascinated and funny the collectors with their varied interests have been over the years.

[1] http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
[2] http://www.tomsawyer.com/gallery/index.php
[3] http://www.freemove.it/images/dataflow.avi