Visual representation of Dhamma

Meta dev
1

I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of interface for visually representing and exploring all of the causal relationships in the Dhamma and discovering relevant suttas.

My first attempt at this is the following: https://kumu.io/sjayasinghe/dhamma#nidana

However, I’m finding the options provided by kumu to be somewhat limiting and considering building something on my own.

Bhante @sujato mentioned that a REST API is being developed for SC. This will be quite useful for the project I’m working on. Will @blake be able to give me the specification for the API? I might also be able to help out with the backend development if needed.

Also I’m open to advice about how best to visually represent the different elements/relationships. Here is a gallery of different types of visualizations for inspiration: https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Gallery

Currently thinking something like this would be ideal: http://bl.ocks.org/robschmuecker/7880033

2 Likes
2

This sounds great. It’s actually something that I have mentioned a number of times that I’d like to see, but we haven’t have any chance to move forward on it. While I don’t know anything about how such technologies work, it does seem that D3 is the library of choice for such work.

The block that you link to would be ideal for showing the texts as an ordered hierarchy. This is one possible application. Another would be to view the parallel relationships. We now have several tens of thousands of such relationships, defined in JSON. Something like this might be useful there:

1 Like