After noticing the beauty behind xkcd's beautiful graphs depicting the Interactions of Movie Characters, Stanford student Vadim Ogievetsky decided to develop an online software tool that would allow him to generate visually similar looking versions. Accordingly, PlotWeaver [stanford.edu] presents an efficient and effective layout algorithm that, with the users help, generates visual results similar to these hand-crafted posters. Ultimately, his aim is to even automate the whole process from movie script or IMDB quote page to a beautiful representative visual depiction.

According to his resulting student paper, the software allows to clone the "Star Wars" visualization in about 33 minutes.

Via @brendandawes.