Yaya Lu

Alumni

Picture of Yaya Lu

Yaya Lu is in her final semester of a Bachelor of Software Engineering at the ANU. She is passionate about human-centric computing, and creating inter-disciplinary projects that challenge peoples’ perceptions of the capabilities of software. She has also been fascinated with Ancient Greek mythology since primary school. Along with Ben and Greta, she developed a dynamic graphing platform and web interface that that displays the complex genealogies that exist in Greek myth.

The genealogical connections in the Greek mythic storyworld are particularly fascinating due to their complex and unusual representations of family relationships. For example, entities could be born from the ground (autochthony), from a non-reproductive body part of another entity, created from thin air, or from parthenogenesis. The myths are also rife with contestation due to the many variations of the stories over multiple millennia; and frequent incest means that graphical representations of these relationships cannot conform to conventional genealogical graph formats. As such, existing attempts at graphing these relationships have been unruly, unreadable, and rarely incorporated elements of the digital realm, such as interactivity, exploration, and generous navigation mechanisms. To address this, Yaya developed a web platform that attempts to not only visualise, but highlight the inherent complexities of the Greek family dynamics, through creation of a data card referencing system, a dynamically-generated graph, all of which was validated through several rounds of user testing. Although this project was intended as an honours project, it is ongoing and Yaya is excited to continue working on it in the future. The live interface is available online, and you can contact Yaya for more information at yaya.lu@anu.edu.au.

bars search times arrow-up