Within my engineering career, I learned the importance of understanding data and the insights it can lend. Below is a visulaization of every Act in Australian Federal law. The nodes are linked where an Act “amends” another act. Though interesting to look at, the visualization didin’t offer any immediate use. I was expecting the data to be more hierarchial, but it seems the interrelation between legislation is very complex and multi-directional. So the search for a better visualization continues.

I used Python (including networkx and pyvis) to extract metadata on Federal laws and their interlinkages and then produce the network visualization.

Nuts and Bolts