Visualizing hierarchies with treemap tools

ctietze

https://sachachua.com/blog/2025/01/treemap-visualization-of-an-org-mode-file/

My imagination doesn't suffice to come up with a good use of a treemap visualization tool for my Zettelkasten, but maybe you can use this

webtreemap: https://github.com/danvk/webtreemap
more colorful treemap: https://github.com/nikolaydubina/treemap

One would need to start somewhere and then traverse all links into a tree-like structure, then use the visualization tool.

The problem with the link network of a Zettelkasten is it's potentially cyclic nature. You can have links from A→B and B→A at the same time.

So maybe this lends itself more to the group of #Folgezettel aficionados.

Anyway, please share your stuff if you try this!

Sascha

In hindsight, Sacha was 40% of my reasons to give Emacs a chance. Good!

r1tger

So I took a quick swipe at this. I'm already generating a Map of Content for each community of notes in my Zettelkasten. It's basically a way of grouping notes, based on the network of folgezettel, which results in 9 separate communities containing all my notes.

Before I can draw the treemap, there's a few questions I needed to answer first:

• a container for the community is needed. I'm using the note in the community that's referred to the most from other notes. For me, this is a nice indicator of importance of a note;
• size of a note within a community needs to be decided. Again, I'm using the number of incoming connections to each note;
• "heat" needs to be determined for each note. Here I'm taking a percentage of incoming connections for each note against the number of incoming connections for the container note.

As you might expect, using treemap, you'll end up with an image that's barely readable, and not really usable. It also tends to eat smaller notes (fewer incoming connections) in order to "improve" readability. There's probably ways to improve layout and add a URL map, but I can't really be bothered:

Treemap generates a SVG file, which you can zoom into nearly without limit. The forum doesn't allow SVG though, so the above is a PNG conversion of the generated file.