genealogy of influence

So my part of this site is a graph (opens in a new window) of the "genealogy of influence" of writers and artists over time. You can go here to find some old versions of the graph.

A guiding quote from Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History on the genealogy of things/ideas:

if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is "something altogether different" behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.

I want to emphasize that ideas have no essence, but can play many roles and obey many masters. I think this is one of the reasons people misinterpret Richard Dawkins - by attributing the same intent to all memes. For instance, William of Ockham is a devout Christian but sets the stage for modern science in the 14th century by insisting that we can only manipulate and understand our propositions and symbols, not things or rules of nature as such (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - "the object of science is not what is but what is known"). What reaction would he have had if he had known the consequences of his ontological framework?

I need collaboration on the graph, so I've added a help list just above it. Feel free to add comments to this post. The layout is certainly not optimal - I am continually experimenting with removing unwieldy edges, but there is supposedly a reason for every edge I've added so far. Know of a way I can minimize edge crossings?

It would be great if people could live-edit - adding nodes and edges and voting on edges with something like SwarmSketch (seems to be down, here is a post about it) where you can vote on the opacity of lines drawn before you.