Half matrix for symmetrical relations

An experiment on showing a weighted symmetric relation. Since the depicted relation is symmetric (and reflexive), only half of the matrix (even excluding the diagonal) can be shown without losing information. This could be useful to save screen estate.

Unfortunately, reading the half-matrix does not feel very natural, making especially difficult to see line-based patterns, since lines are often split in halves. A set of interactive techniques is put into place to ease these issues, at least in part.

In this specific example, the number of co-occurrences of characters from Les Miserables is encoded with the area of the blue dots (a different take on this classic example by Mike Bostock).