It almost surprised that this diagram of all of the relationships in Infinite Jest is as simple as it is. Oh, it’s a huge graph, and there are a ton of people on it, but when you realize that every student ever named, for example, is included, and that some of the nodes represent categories of people rather than individuals, it is not as daunting as I would have expected. Still awesome though[1], and with tons of potential for expansion. The creator mentions adding line thickness or color to represent the importance of a connection, for example. They also mention that adding more detail made the diagram unreadable – that step would probably require some type of interactive layers to make the additional information coherent. If you have read the book, though, check it out!
[1] A few unlabelled connector nodes, which does bother me a bit…but awesome!
Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek