Flavorwire

Talk about your ambitious design projects: Brendan Griffen set out to make a graph charting the relationship between all of the thinkers, authors, and comedians in history — or at least all of the ones who can be found on Wikipedia. “The size of the nodes indicates how influential their work was to all of the other members of the network,” he explains. “The graph was created by querying a database of Wikipedia and determining their influences (based on the info-boxes of each person).” No surprise that Faulkner, Hemingway, and Nabokov are among the most influential authors of the 19th and 20th century; meanwhile George Carlin and Richard Pryor are tops among comedians, and Nietzsche seems to have had some sort of impact on almost everyone who came after him. Check out a zoomable version of Griffen’s graph and pick up a print here. [via FlowingData]