The discussion of social networks in Infovis often does not address the challenges of capturing politicians’ messages in social media and its transformation to visualization. The artist Mark Lombardi is known for his diagrammatic hand drawings, using curved arcs and edges to capture the global frauds perpetrated by politicians during the 1980s. Through the years, visual researchers have tried to depict Lombardi’s designs using curved arcs to represent edges. Researchers defined Lombardi’s drawing as a computer mechanism of circular arcs with edges that hold vertices that lie on a circle that has creative placements for both vertices and edges. Duncan et al. (2012) introduced the idea of Lombardi Spirograph, where the graph consists of a group of symmetries of a regular polygon, including rotations and reflections.
Bringing Lombardi’s visualization techniques together to the present times raise the question, can Lombardi’s graphic design allow us to display the President Donald Trump tweets? To address this question, we used Duncan et al.’s model to draw a Lombardi design based on President Trump’s tweets. Our outcome displayed that content of President Trump tweets lack of structure and lack of consistency, generates more arcs and edges in compare to number of arks captured in Lombardi drawing of president George W. Bush (1999).
Our findings suggest that quantifying and visualizing today’s politicians’ messages is a hard task. New research is needed to develop techniques to capture not only today’s political social media but also incorporate the truth and falsehoods in the messages into the visualization.
2020 Friedman, A. “Mark Lombardi’s model through the examination of President Trump’s tweets.” UseR! 2020.
