Yes, Alexander's article, "A City is Not a Tree," was quite explicit about this kind of formalist modeling of pedestrian flows through architecture and urban spaces.  Alexander tells us that trees are not good!  As far as I know, he didn't continue in that vein for too long, but Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson at UCL developed an analytic tool they called "space syntax" (as elaborated in their book, _The social logic of space_ (1984) and illustrated with a bunch of graphs and tree diagrams, like the attached) that took "tree diagram reasoning" in architecture to another level.

Best,

-Warren

Warren SACK
Chair + Professor, Film + Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz
Editorial Group Member, Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies
Book: The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-arts


On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 2:44 PM Evan Hepler-Smith <evan.heplersmith@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Bernard,

I second Matthew's reference to Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees, an art-historical treatment of just this question, including a taxonomy of kinds of trees. And Theodora's reference to her own work!

I have an article discussing the development of trees and graphs as mathematical objects and calculation devices in comparison/connection with the graphical practices of organic chemists circa the late 19th century and 1960s:


(Preprint linked on my website; I can send a PDF of the published version to anyone interested.)

Alexander et al., A Pattern Language also seems relevant to this question, though not specifically about trees. (Although Alexander's earlier essay "A City is Not a Tree" might be.)

Evan

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 2:21 PM BRIAN JUSTIE <b1@ucla.edu> wrote:
Bernard,
Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis has a brief section (pp. 95-105) on the history of tree diagrams in humanistic inquiry, which includes a handful of potentially useful citations.
Hope this helps,
Brian

—
Brian Justie
b1@ucla.edu 
PhD Student, Department of Information Studies
Researcher, UCLA Labor Center



On Mar 26, 2020, at 2:03 PM, Jeff Scott Nagy <jsnagy@stanford.edu> wrote:

Dear Bernie,

If by trees in CS you mean at least in part the abstract data type, Knuth gives a short history and bibliography on pp. 406-7 of the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming, the section beginning with "Trees have of course been in existence since the third day of creation..." On p. 459, he gives a little more on the history of trees as CS data structures in particular. 

Happy to send photos of these pages if they'd be of use! I think the files are too big to not get bounced by the list though. 

Sincerely,
Jeff

From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Bernard Geoghegan <bernardgeoghegan2010@u.northwestern.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2020 4:05 PM
To: Sigcis <members@sigcis.org>
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Tree diagrams in computer science and other fields (i.e. genealogy)
 
Dear Colleagues,

 

A little query sent across the lockdowns and quarantines: Can anyone recommend scholarship on the tree-style diagrams that circulate both in computer science and a wide range of other fields, for example, genealogy, kinship? Is there any good work on the history of these diagrams, their intersection, and what they might say about possible links in styles of reasoning across fields that might, otherwise, seem remote?

 

Thanks for your thoughts, 
b

 

 

-- 
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media
Chair of the UG Assessment Board, Digital Culture

 

Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London 
The Strand Building
Room S3.08
WC2R 2LS

 

Office: +44 (0)20 7848 4750
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