Monadic exploration is a new approach to interacting with relational information spaces that challenges the distinction between the whole and its parts. Building on the work of sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour we turn to the concept of the monad as a useful lens on online communities and collections that expands the possibility for creating meaning in their navigation. While existing interfaces tend to emphasize either the structure of the whole or details of a part, monadic exploration brings these opposing perspectives closer together in continuous movements between partially overlapping points of view. We present a visualization that reflects a given node’s relative position within a network using radial displacements and visual folding. To investigate the potential of monadic exploration we report on an iterative design process of a web-based visualization of a highly crossreferenced book and its six-month deployment.
~
DÖRK, Marian, COMBER, Rob and DADE-ROBERTSON, Martyn, 2014. Monadic exploration: seeing the whole through its parts. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Online. Toronto Ontario Canada: ACM. 26 April 2014. p. 1535–1544. ISBN 978-1-4503-2473-1. DOI 10.1145/2556288.2557083. [Accessed 7 August 2025].