Visualization – Page 17

Interactive Matter

The Interactive Matter group that I and Lynn Hughes lead met this Monday and Tuesday, May 5th and 6th, 2008, to talk about theories and methodologies of interactivity. A series of excellent short papers were presented on Monday that surveyed the literature and practices of research into interactivity. Some of the presenters were Chris Salter, Sara Diamon, Ron Wakkary, Cindy Poremba, StÃ©fan Sinclair, Liss Platt, Shirley Madill, Susan Brown, Glen Lowry, and Jutta Treviranus. (I’m sure I missing someone.) I’m still processing this, but some of the highlights for me were:

Interactivity matters because it is such broad term that is used as if we understand it. There is the material dimension of interactivity, the ethical and social matters around interactivity, and the issues that matter.
It is time now for the digital arts and humanities to recover interactivity from scientific approaches like HCI, computer science and software engineering. While they yield interesting insights into cognition, efficiency and the engineering of interactivity – we want to look at hwo interactivity is embodied, how it has human contexts, how it has histories, and how it is imagined. That is what the arts and humanities can contribute.
We are interested in much more than the interactive work. We are interested in its history of production and design. We are interested in its context and reception. We are interested in how it might evolve over time and be maintained, preserved, exhibited again, or disappear.
We are interested in practices that approach interactivity not as something to be observed and critiques, but something that is learned through interaction. We imagine practices that bridge the practices of discovery of art, design and the humanities.

VersionBeta3 < Main < WikiTADA

We have a new version of the Big See collocation centroid. Version Beta 3 now has a graphical user interface where you can control settings before running the animation and once the animation is run. As before we show the process of developing the 3D model as an animation. Once run you can manipulate the 3D model. If you turn on stereo you can see the text model as a 3D object if you have the right glasses on (it supports different types including red/green.)

I’m still trying to articulate the goals of the project. Like any humanities computing project the problem and solutions are emerging as we develop and debate. I now think of it as an attempt to develop a visual model of a text that can be scaled out to very high resolution displays, 3D displays, and high performance computing. The visual models we have in the humanities are primitive – the scrolling page and the distribution graph. TextArc introduced a model, the weighted centroid, that is rich and rewards exploration. I’m trying to extend that into three dimensions while weaving in the distribution graph. Think of the Big See is a barrel of distributions.

Visit the Second Life Gaming Sculpture Garden

Screen of Second Life

My students in the Digital Games course have all finished their historic game character sculptures for McMaster University’s Gaming Sculpture Garden (see earlier post). Thanks to the Library who have paid for the island and supported this project. Thanks to Dave Marhal who set up the garden, taught the students how to sculpt in Second Life, and then helped arrange the garden.

The experiment went better than I expected. Even the students used to Maya, who found SL fairly crude as a modeling environment, enjoyed the social aspect of an assignment in SL. Come visit by using this SLURL and teleporting. Click on the sculptures for an introduction to the characters. Take a tour around the island and its surreal spaces. Could you teach or learn in this space?

Another Screen of Second Life

FlowingData: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe

Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)

Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism

Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.

Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeareâ€™s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)

High Resolution Visualization

Image of Monitor
In a previous post I wrote about a High Performance Visualization project. We got the chance to try the visualization on a Toshiba high resolution monitor (something like 5000 X 2500). Above you can see a picture I took with my Blackberry.

What can we do with high resolution displays? What would we show and how could we interact with them? I take it for granted that we won’t just blow up existing visualizations.

High Performance Visualization

I’m working with the folks at our local HPC consortium, SHARCNET on imagining how we could visualize texts with high resolution displays, 3D displays, and cluster computing. The project, temporarily called The Big See has generated an interested beta version. You can see a video on the process running and images from the final visualization here, Version Beta 2.

One of the unanticipated insights from this project is that the process of building the 3D model, which I will call the *animation*, is as interesting as the final visual model. From the very first version you could see the text flowing up and the high frequency words jostling each other for position. Words would start high and then slide clockwise around. Collocations build up as it goes. We don’t have the animation right, but I think we are on to something. You can see Version B2 as an MP4 animation here.

Now we will start playing with the parameters – colours, transparency, and weight of lines.

Tech and the Humanities: The MLA at Chicago

Right after Christmas I was involved in two events at the MLA. I organized and presided over a session on Open Digital Communities which was nicely written up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Tech and the Humanities: A Report from the Front Lines – Chronicle.com.

I also participated in a newish format for the MLA – what is now being called a digital roundtable on Textual Visualization organized by Maureen Jameson where I showed visualization tools available through TAPoRware and the TAPoR portal.