The book is divided in seven chapters and I like to think of it almost as a symphony, with the first three chapters providing a foundational opening for the lavish visual burst of chapters 4 and 5 - the sonata’s allegro or vivace - immediately followed by its final cadence, “Complex Beauty” (perhaps my favorite chapter) and “Looking Ahead”. Here’s a bit on the book’s structure, as explained in the Introduction:
01 | The Tree of Life
The book opens with “Tree of Life,” an exploration of the sacred meaning of trees and their widespread use as a classification system over the centuries. It showcases an assortment of ancient representations — as predecessors of modern-day network diagrams — where the tree metaphor is used to visually convey a variety of topics, from theological events to an encyclopedia’s table of contents.
02 | Form Trees to Networks
The second chapter, “From Trees to Networks,” makes the case for a new network-based outlook on the world, one that is based on diversity, decentralization, and nonlinearity. It explores several instances — from the way we envision our cities to the way we organize information and decode our brain — where an alternative network model is replacing the hierarchical tree schema.
显示全部