A multipotentialite is a person who has many different interests and creative pursuits in life. Multipotentialites have no “one true calling” the way specialists do. Being a multipotentialite is our destiny. We have many paths and we pursue all of them, either sequentially or simultaneously (or both).
I recently discovered this concept and decided to compile a list of my various interests over the years. It turned out there were A LOT. As the list grew I realised that a visualisation would probably be easier to understand.
I wanted a diagram that would let me show multiple interests, group them with one another but still link them with elements in other groups. A mind-map/brain dump style diagram makes the most sense for this kind of data. I also wanted to build it so that it could easily be updated over time, as my interests grow. Finally I wanted a solution that would allow other multipotentialites to easily throw together a version with their own data. With these requirements a static diagram would be no good, it needed to be something that could be automatically generated from a dataset. After a bit of playing around with various js libraries I came across amcharts force directed tree diagram.
A Force Directed Tree is a special kind of chart used to display of multi-item data related in hierarchical, linear or mixed way, as a series of linked bubbles.
With a bit of tweaking this is what I ended up with:
Multipotentialite visualisation of interests
It was relatively straight forward to set up based on the existing demo. To make it easier for someone to do up their own version I moved the data out into a separate json file. If you want to do one for yourself simply
- Download the code from bitbucket
- Ensure that you can get the diagram working with the existing mydata.json file. Just open the index.html file in your browser. See README.md for notes on Chrome.
- Once that is done you replace the content of the mydata.json file with valid json listing YOUR interests in the same format and make sure you save the file.
- Refresh the index.html page to see your version. If you have an error in your json data the diagram simply won’t display. I recommend that if this happens you use the following JSON Validator to check and correct the format of your list of interests.
