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It's only better if you -- by reading up on convention beforehand -- know which way an edge points; does decreasing thickness indicate an incident node, or the
by Emore 16y ago
It's only better if you -- by reading up on convention beforehand -- know which way an edge points; does decreasing thickness indicate an incident node, or the opposite? Not clear on its own.
- palish 16y agoIt's an arrowhead. It goes in the direction it points. For example, (A -> B) is drawn: A @===---- B
- bOR_ 16y agoThey test a few different schemes, but it is sort of embarrassing that in their final summary graph (figure 9), they use the arrowheads again to indicate which representation performs best.
- jasondavies 16y agoAgreed; my initial interpretation was thinking of the tapered edges as comet tails or motion blur, which is the opposite direction to what they want to depict.
- scott_s 16y agoI also thought the thick end meant it was receiving flow as opposed to originating it. It's also hard for me to look at the graphs and not see motion, particularly the curved ones - years of reading comics. But reading graphs is an expert activity, and I'm open to the idea that with practice this method could become better.
- Chris_Newton 16y ago> It's only better if you -- by reading up on convention beforehand -- know which way an edge points Actually, if I'm reading the paper properly, no it's not. The authors appear to have found that both the light-to-dark and the dark-to-light styles performed significantly better than arrows, and that the tapering effect was better still. This seems reasonable to me: even if you're unsure about the convention at first, you probably only have to find one obvious edge to establish which way things "point".