Here is a neat idea for small visualizations to help follow email threads, ThreadVis – Visualising Conversations – Mozilla Thunderbird Add-on. Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel developed ThreadVis as a Thunderbird Extension as part of his Master’s Thesis, which is available for download (PDF).
Stéfan pointed me to a neat site that has an animated visualization of the History of the Australian Web. The visualization show the rise of sites lik ebay, facebook and google.
I like the use of tabs to control what the dimensions show. The tab is right where the axis is.
Thanks to James K I discovered Twitterfall which shows a waterfall of tweets based on keywords and other settings. An interesting example of what St̩fan Sinclair and I call a Knowledge Radio Рan application that organizes knowledge into a live stream.
I put a photo set up on Flickr for our Hacking as a Way of Knowing project. The set documents the evolution of the project which I’ve tentatively named the “ReReader for the Writing on the Wall”. Thanks to all those who made the project and the workshop a success. Now I have to think a bit deeper about making as knowing and things as theories.
Today was the first day of the Hacking as a Way of Knowing e-waste fabrication workshop. Above you can see the text from a fax thermal printer roll projected onto a wall. (At least I think that’s what it is.) Below is an Arduino connected to a a speaker. Stéfan has working on taking a RSS feed and triggering events so we can connect stuff to it to create cool stuff.
We got talking about why fabrication is taking off. Turkel has his lab. Matt Ratto at the Univerity of Toronto has a lab (with a great name – CriticalMaking.com. Some of the reasons are:
Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science is an article that presents an interesting view of the interdisciplinary relationships between the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and the sciences on the other. The article used “clickstream” data or usage data collected at various scholarly portals that show not citation links but connections in the activities of the users.
The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences.
They describe the visual appearance of the visualization (above) thus,
To provide a visual frame of reference, we summarize the overall visual appearance of the map of science in Fig. 5 in terms of a wheel metaphor. The wheel’s hub consists of a large inner cluster of tightly
connected social sciences and humanities journals (white, yellow and gray). Domain classifications for the journals in this cluster include international studies, Asian studies, religion, music, architecture and design, classical studies, archeology, psychology, anthropology, education, philosophy, statistics, sociology, economics, and finance. The wheel’s outer rim results from a myriad of connections in M’ between journals in the natural sciences (red, green, blue). In clockwise order, starting at 1PM, the rim contains physics, chemistry, biology, brain research, health care and clinical trials journals. Finally, the wheel’s spokes are given by connections in M’ that point from journals in the central hub to the outer rim.
This article came out of work funded by Mellon at the MESUR project.
I just blogged about the interface ideas in Stranger than Fiction from MK12. Turns out they were behind the interface for MI5 in the latest James Bond – see UI’s from Movies – Quantum of Solace and see the response from MK12. For images from the movie see NUI Group: Quantom of Solace images.
Stan pointed me to search-cube – the Visual Search Engine which generates a 3D cube of images from your search results. It’s a mashup of Google image search. I’m not sure if it is more effective than just looking at the results from a Google Image search, but I like the way panels are missing so you can see through the cube to stuff on the other side.
Congratulations to Ray Siemens and company for INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments which got funding as a Major Collaborative Research Initiative from SSHRC. I’m part of the Interface Design group led by Stan Ruecker.
