Data visualization: Marvel universe
Marvel Universe is a fictional universe which based on the American comic stories published by Marvel Entertainment. It consists of thousands of separate universes and all the stories in this “multiverse” happened on Earth. In my Information Visualization class, my teammates and I made an info graphic on the topic of Marvel Universe out of our shared passion for Marvel movies, and also in the honor of Stan Lee, the father of Marvel, who recently passed away.
The graphic is made up by three parts: the Marvel superhero networking, superhero power ranking and heroes/villains demographic information.
Superhero Networking
We wanted to give a general outlook of the superhero’s network in the sense of who usually hang out together or who is the “it” superhero, and we wanted it to be visually aesthetic, so we decided to go with a beautiful circular layout while viewers can recognize different superhero groups and their relations by different colors.
From the visualization, we can see that Captain America is the most centralized superhero in the Marvel Universe followed by Spiderman and Iron Man. The major superhero groups are Avengers, marked in purple, featured by Captain America, Iron Man etc; the Spiderman’s group, marked in pink, featured by Spiderman and Daredevil; the X-Men group, marked in blue featured by Wolverine, Professor X, the Beast, etc; the Fantastic Four group, marked in orange, featured by the Thing, Human Torch, etc; Thor’s group, marked in light blue; Doctor Strange’s group, marked in apricot; the Sub-Mariner group, marked in yellow as well as the New Warriors group, marked in grey. It’s not difficult to tell that superheroes in the Avengers group have more interactions with other superheroes, because the purple edges permeate the graph. At the meantime, the X-Men are more connected within their own group.
This graphic was made mainly by using Gephi. The dataset we used is The Marvel Universe Social Network Dataset from Kaggle.
Superhero Power Ranking
Based on the study of the superheroes networking. We selected the top 10 most connected superheroes as subjects. And then we built our own database referred by information collected on the SHDb (https://www.superherodb.com/battle/). SHDb has data of side-by-side power comparison for all superheroes. The scores for all superheroes were voted by Marvel fans.
We compared “Intelligence”, ”Combat”, “Speed”, “Durability” and “Strength”. For each super power, we pulled out the winners and show their profile illustrations besides the graph, so that users can easily notice the winners.
Among the 10 most connected superheroes, we can see that the the best fighter are Captain America (we’re not surprised) and Wolverine; the smartest ones are Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Scarlet Witch and Vision; the toughest(durability) ones are Wolverine and Thing; the fastest one is Vision; the strongest ones are Iron Man and Thing. All together, we’ve seen each of Iron Man, Thing and Vision’s name twice, so we think they might be considered the most powerful superheroes according to the fans. Also, there’s a lot of purple in on the winner list of each ability, which means that the Avengers has gotten a great team!
For the full report of our project, please see on http://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/projects/marvel-universe-visualization/.