In The Book of Circles, his companion volume to the popular Book of Trees, Manuel Lima takes us on a lively tour through millenia of information design. Three hundred detailed and colourful illustrations cover an encyclopedic array of subjects, drawing fascinating parallels across time and culture. The clay tokens used by ancient Sumerians as a system of recording trade are juxtaposed with the logos of modern retailers like Target; Venn diagrams are discussed side by side with symbols of the Christian trinity, the trefoil shape of the biohazard symbol, and the Olympic rings; a diagram revealing the characteristics of 10,000 porn stars displays structural similarities to early celestial charts placing the earth at the centre of the universe.

Trees are in nature but also in our minds. Their shape have influenced how we communicate via diagrams, link ideas together and illustrate deeper human thoughts in art throughout history. Trees have been a recurrent metaphor for mapping information in numerous scientific domains, such as biology, genetics, sociology and linguistics and information visualisation is a growing area of interest amongst a variety of business practices. This book will expose our long-lasting obsession with trees, as metaphors for organising and representing hierarchical information, and provide a broad visual framework for the various types of executions, many dating back hundreds of years.

Blogging presents one of the most fascinating social phenomenons of our time. This change in the flow of online information might radically change the way we look at news providers and large media conglomerates. The result of a MFA thesis at Parsons School of Design, Blogviz is a flash driven visualization model for mapping the transmission and internal structure of top links across the blogosphere. It explores the idea of meme propagation by assuming a parallel with the spreading of most cited URLs in daily weblog entries. The main goal of Blogviz is to unravel hidden patterns in the topics diffusion process. What's the life cycle of a topic? How does it start and how does it evolve through time? Are topics constrained to a specific community of users? Who are the most influential and innovative blogs in any topic? Are there any relationships amongst topic proliferators?