Serial and Parallel relations

After just com­plet­ing a sta­tic news visu­al­i­sa­tion, I realised the way I linked the sto­ries and authors together was in a ser­ial fash­ion. That is to say, I linked the sto­ries along a path that pro­gressed from one story to the next in order of the posi­tion they appeared in the paper, but they could of been linked in other ways.

I want to see in which sit­u­a­tions cer­tain link­ing con­ven­tions would be best, so I’ve decided to do a lit­tle rela­tion research and theory.

Ser­ial linking

Link­ing a series of items that con­nect to one another via the next in line, i.e. 1 links to 2, 2 links to 3, but 1 can’t link to 3 directly, it has to go through 2.

For what I’ve been work­ing on recently, minus the poster I just cre­ated, I think the use of ser­ial link­ing would be best used on things that are con­stant, for exam­ple ‘time and date’. Using this method would offer a sim­pler way of relat­ing items to one another, but may offer a more con­scise set of relations.

Par­al­lel linking

Link­ing items together by direct con­tact with each other, i.e. 1 links to every­thing it wants to, 2 links to every­thing it wants to, etc. etc.

Using par­al­lel link­age would offer a wider set of rela­tions, as one story would link out to infi­nite num­ber of other related items directly with­out going through a neigh­bour. How­ever with the wider set of rela­tions, all may not be as closely related to one another as with the ser­ial linking.