Mid-Term Presentation

Here itâ??s my first visual prototype shown at the mid-term review. The underlying concept was based on a major aspiration: nodes local stability and links global connectivity. What I tried was to position the nodes in a structured way, so they would remain fixed, and to some level, under control. The links, however, would be in constant change and the outcome would be highly random and unpredictable. The reason why I chose to sort all the nodes in a precise manner was to be able to isolate the major hubs and have some control over the lattice resulting from the links agglomeration. Looking at it now, it seems the result was too much rigid and strict. The radial diagram with its implosive structure reinforces the structure rigidness by resembling a closed system that probably doesnâ??t describe so well the blogs fundamental openness. Anyway, I believe it was a positive tryout and I learned a lot from it.


For a larger version of this image click here.

I realized I had to take a different path. I was trying too hard to control the outcome and I believe the result showed exactly that. Iâ??ll have to loose some of my constant need for control and let the system be more auto-sufficient, self-organizing and adaptive.

Another criticism I received during the presentation was that I was being to concerned with the visual aspect of it, and that I was thinking too much as a visual designer. Well, although I agree in part with the critic, my thesis as sertion has always been the visualization of a specific dissemination pattern, and from my extensive research in complex networks, I truly believe that the only way I can positively contribute to this field is by employing my visual and interface design knowledge. In my first prototype presentation I dissected several problems on the visualization of complex networks and proposed distinct solutions that might solve some of its inconsistencies. I believe there has to be a balance between highly complex network visualizations that offer a poor functionality and highly aesthetic/innovative visual representations that might suffer from the same paradigm. I just have to pursue that balance.

You can see the whole presentation in the following link (use arrow keys):
> Mid-Term Presentation.

4 Million Blogs

Exactly a month ago, on September 24th, Technorati hit the 4 million mark, and itâ??s currently tracking 4,379,577 blogs. Coincidently, 4 days before, Wikipedia Foundation announced the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia. Interesting coincidence.

Blogs Statistics from LiveJournal

This link contains very interesting statistics from LiveJournalâ??s blog community, tracking 4.918.064 blogs/journals. The age distribution results are not surprising but I was impressed with the majority of blogs (67.1%) being maintained by women, against menâ??s less then half percentage of 32.9%. The raw data is free to use.

Code Profiles

Yesterday I went to the Chelsea Art Museum and I was happy to see Bradford Paleyâ??s Code Profiles project. CodeProfiles was written in August 2002 and commissioned by Christiane Paul, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

â??Code Profiles is a software that displays its underlying code and comments on itself. The code reads in its own source and displays it in a tiny font. As users move their finger over the touch screen, each line of the code becomes legible. The software moves three points in â??code spaceâ??: the white line traces the code in the order it was written by the artist; the amber line traces the code word by word as someone might read it; the green line shows a sample of how the computer reads the code. The code lines themselves gradually get brighter as they execute more. In a self-reflexive way, Code Profiles unveils a â??virtual objectâ?? as the algorithms constructing this very object.â??

The truly interesting feature of this project is that itâ??s displayed on a painting frame, and from distance it looks like a still image, until you get real close and move your finger over the touch screen that replaces the canvas.



I apologize for the image size but this was the most decent one I could find online.

Hereâ??s a link to the project:

CodeProfiles

This page offers a CodeProfiles Remix by Martin Wattenberg:

CodeProfiles Remix

Austin Images

While in Austin for the InfoVis 2004 Conference I took some pictures of the city. If you're interested check this link:

Austin Images

Production

After two and a half months of a lot of reading and extensive research in complex networks visualization, which coincided with the conclusion of a p arallel project developed at PIIM, I believe itâ??s time to delve deep into the production/design phase. As much as I like to research and analyze other peopleâ??s projects, Iâ??m eager to start developing my own concept. Iâ??ve been doing a lot of sketching and thinking on possible features of the project and ways of interrelating them in a solid interactive application. My future steps will incorporate the creation of visual models, technical experiments (back-end/front-end), and a lot of reflective design. Part of this process transition, from research to production, will be illustrated at my mid-term presentation, on October 21st.

On future posts I will describe my thesis final concept, my main goals and ambitions for this project. The choice of a subject of analysis has been a long difficult route but finally I dissected a subject that truly inspires me and represents most of my initial motivations.

InfoVis 2004 Projects

Geotime

The first project showed at InfoVis 2004, on Monday 8:30 AM, was one of the most innovative. Geotime by Thomas Kapler is a project financed by NGA and it aims to analyze observations over Time and Geography, which is a particular hard task to visualize. I believe this project is one of the best that Iâ??ve seen in overlapping these two realms. For more information hereâ??s a link to the projectâ??s paper (pdf) Geotime. I will try to contact the author and see if thereâ??s a way of downloading or experimenting the project online.



MNIST Digi ts

This project was shown as a poster. The visualization is not highly innovative, although its 3D properties are quite interesting, however its resilience to complexity is extraordinary. I saw the author zooming in and out of our virtual spatial galaxy in his Dell laptop at a surprising ease. We could observe millions of other galaxies, millions of highly complex nodes, appearing on the screen in an effortless manner. Unfortunately the demo is only available for Windows and Linux, but nevertheless hereâ??s the link to the website.

Monkellipse

Another project co-authored by Bradford Paley, author of TextArc, shown as a poster at the InfoVis 2004. Monkellipse maps all the articles and papers, divided by subject areas, that appeared at the InfoVis Conference since its beginning. One thing that really amazed me in this project was that it was built in flash. Since Iâ??m building my thesis project front-end application in flash, Iâ??ve been a little worried with its resistance to complexity. It was encouraging to see how smoothly a flash application can perform, even when it displays more than 640 nodes. Hereâ??s a link to the project website.

Time-varying data visualizati on using information flocking boids

Unfortunately, one of my favorite projects shown at InfoVis 2004 is not available online, except for a fee of $19 at the IEEE website. This project is worthy of note since it illustrates innovative visual methods of displaying complex networks. The only free link I could find online was the authorâ??s personal website, however, there are no images of the project. When I have the time Iâ??ll scan a few images from the InfoVis proceedings publication so you can see what I mean.

Steerable, Progressive Multidimensional Scaling

This Project by Tamara Munzner and Matt Williams offers a compelling approach to Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) in the form of a computation engine and visualization tool that progressively computes an MDS layout and handles datasets of over one million points. For more information hereâ??s the projectâ??s website.



Hierarchical Clustering Explorer

Hierarchical Clustering Explorer is a Bioinformatics visualization tool and can be downloaded here. (only for Wi ndows)

Others

Sadly, many projects present at InfoVis 2004 are not yet available online. I will try to update this post when these projects become available.

InfoVis 2004

I just returned from the InfoVis 2004 Conference in Austin, Texas. As the only Parsons student present at the Conference I feel the responsibility of exposing some of the projects shown there. This trip was sponsored by â??PIIM - Parsons Institute of Information Mappingâ?? where Iâ??ve been working for the past month as a design researcher. I went together with Takaaki Okada, also from PIIM.

We arrived there Sunday morning, October 10th, very exhausted and with almost no sleep. The afternoon was spent around the streets of downtown Austin, enjoying the hot weather, quiet streets and overall tranquil surroundings. Good food, good music, cheap beer and pleasant people, some of the qualities the capital of Texas has to offer.

Ok back to the conference now. Monday was for me the best day, not only in terms of presented papers, but also because of the poster session. The poster session was very worthy and probably the best event of the conference. First, we could talk directly to the designers (not that many), authors and researchers. Second, we were able to try the prototypes ourselves, and not just see nice screen-shots. Third, because most of the projects were still under construction, we could make suggestions and brainstorm with the authors about other possible improvements. Actually I must admit that many authors, most of them computer scientists, when realizing that I was from Parsons, instantly asked for design suggestions or opinions. It was also very interesting to notice that Parsons is very respected in an environment mostly filled with computer scientists, mathematicians and programmers.

Tuesday was of poorer quality compared to the previous day. Too many discussions on algorithms, equations and optimization, and not so much on visualization. Even with speakers as renowned as Steve Roth from Carnegie Mellon and George Robertson from Microsoft Research, I believe Monday had much more spice and innovation in the shown papers.

Among the few designers at the Conference were David Lu and Fernanda Viegas. David Lu is a designer at IDEO and is a nice friendly guy. He was there to present a poster on his â??Tenable Informationâ?? project that you can try here . He also has some interesting projects on his personal website. Fernanda Viegas, in case you donâ??t know her, is a major reference for me. She is pursuing a PhD at the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab, and she has been involved in projects such as â??Artifacts of the Presence Eraâ?? and â??PostHistoryâ??. Althought she talked at the conference about the first mentioned project, I think the last one is truly amazing. For more information hereâ??s her research proj ects website.

Iâ??ll describe some of the most relevant projects at InfoVis 2004 in future posts.

Here are the links:

> InfoVis 2004 Conference Website.
> InfoVis 2004 Conference Program (pdf).

Thread Arcs â?? IBM Research

Thread Arcs is a fresh interactive visualization technique designed to help people use threads found in email.




â??Thread Arcs combine the chronology of messages with the branching tree structure of a conversational thread in a mixed-model visualization that is stable and compact. By quickly scanning and interacting with Thread Arcs, people can see various attributes of conversations and find relevant messages in them easily. We tested this technique against other visualization techniques with users own email in a functional prototype of ReMail, our research groupâ??s experimental email client. Thread Arcs proved an excellent match for the types of threads found in usersâ?? email and the qualities users wanted in small-scale thread visualizations.â??





This is a truly interesting visual approach to e-mail threads and ev en to small sized graphs. This concept is part of a major project developed by the Collaborative User Experience team at IBM Research. ReMail is a research project developed for almost a decade and it aims to understand better how people use e-mail and make the experience more functional and straightforward. Some of its features are very encouraging.



Hereâ??s the link of ReMail Website:

ReMail

Hereâ??s a link to the Thread Arcs paper (pdf) by Bernard Kerr:

Thread Arcs

Old is beautiful

Radial Form of Organization Chart (1924)

Alexander Hamilton Institute

â??The radial form of organization chart, showed in the image, has not so much to recommend it as the block and line system. In the first place it is difficult to draw it so as to show lines of authority. It places the emphasis on the central authority, while making it difficult to ascertain the relations of the subordinate divisons to each other.â??


Source:
W. H. Smith., Graphic Statistics in Management (McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, ed. First, 1924).

Estimated Budget Chart (1940)


Source:
H. Arkin., Graphs: How to make and use them (Harper & Brothers Publishe rs, New York, ed. Revised, 1940).

For a larger version of this image click here.