This is a great article and fun to see fundamental concepts get (re)discovered here! A perspective that we can generalize from the hierarchy discussion is to t

This is a great article and fun to see fundamental concepts get (re)discovered here! A perspective that we can generalize from the hierarchy discussion is to think about tool-for-the-job: what is the 'content' job, and what 'jobs' do graphs do well? We think about this a lot as we work on problems like how to make it easy to explore 100,000X+ more relationships on screen than they're showing: https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry . First, what do graph visualizations do? - They let us see the relationships in data. The article discusses hierarchy. But there is also progression, root cause, scope, and basically any correlation/causation relationship ML/AI figures out. There are many interesting relationship questions that pop out as soon as you logs, tables, events, etc! - They let us directly manipulate the nodes & edges, such as for drilling down, navigating, reclustering, etc. - A useful 'aha' is thinking of modern information visualization as trying to optimize some sort of time-to-insight through a sequence of visual interactions. So each view must be information dense for visually revealing certain insights, and make it easy to get to the next set of visual Q&A. - Ex: When the entities are the interesting thing wrt questions, being able to drill down into individual nodes/edges into great dedicated views becomes important, so graphs should often be multimodal. And if the relationship aspect is unimportant... then using graph view hurts more than it helps. - From optimization perspective, it now makes sense to specialize for specific domains. Maybe what is needed is more of a small diagram, and not actually investigating a lot of relationships. Or a graph of subway stops, which has additional visual considerations. For a website, a sitemap navigation vs clickstream product analytics view would likewise need A good analogy is a map. Sometimes exploring Google Maps is great, and you drill into a business inspector sidebar or down to a street view. But other times, it's better to have the map embedded into Yelp.com restaurant entry when you just need a quick view of mapping information as part of some broader context. Or you don't care about that map at all and can skip it. Given all that.. it's interesting to revisit asking... what is the 'content' job to be solved? What kinds of content lean towards graph, and which don't?