Biomapping
In my last blog post I explored the notion that information visualization is not merely a tool, or art, or an agent of clarity but also has the capacity to generate emotion in users and arguably, become a player...
History of electro, metal and jazz through visualization
This idea of mapping music visualizations as a means of discovery is something that I have previously touched on. In looking at examples of music visualizations that have bore applications, something that I find particularly interesting is that some...
Scientific Visualization: how to let the brain understand that it sees itself?
Abstract: Scientific visualizations are part of the branch of data visualization. They primarily show 3D models of natural phenomena. Scientific visualizations are under-represented compared to information visualization (the other part of data visualization). Time to take a closer look...
The Yoza Project : Cellphones and ‘mlearning’ in South-Africa.
Storytelling is the conveying of narratives, an idea as old as human history itself. The origins of narration are difficult to grasp, and because this phenomenon plays such a prominent role in most of our lives, no one is...
Thoughts on the Contemporary Gaming Landscape
This post is a bit of an experiment. Basically, it's a summary of what I would like to write my thesis about. In the spirit of open collaboration, I'd like to know what you think of this idea. Obviously,...
Visualising music: the problems with genre classification
Want to listen to new music but sick of staring at your old MP3 collection? Streaming applications like Spotify, Last.fm and Pandora (US only) recommend related artists. Sites like The Hype Machine and Elbows aggregate music blogs for instant...
Politwittic
Politics in the age of new media have different characteristics than the politics before the year 2000. Since its launch, the World Wide Web revealed itself as a powerful tool to reach a large part of the (wealthy) population....
Visualizing Academic Interest
The internet has been heralded and praised for bringing democracy. It is stated since the advent of the internet that knowledge is no longer bound to limitations, as it goes freely over the web disseminating to all possible directions....
The HK iPhone 4 hunt
Arriving in Hong Kong felt a little weird for me, as frequent mainland visitor with Chinese origin. It was a like coming home, but this time home was a bit off. Now after a couple of days I realize...
Graphical Primitives versus Direct Visualization
A rectangle walks in a bar and orders a drink. An attractive circle sits on a bar stool next to the rectangle. ‘Hey Circle, want to get primitive?’ The Circle looks the rectangle slowly up and down and says:...
The Unbound Book Conference: bloggers needed May 19-21!
We’re seeking bloggers for the Unbound Book Conference (http://eboekenstad.nl/unbound/), a timely international forum on the future of the book and reading and publishing in the digital age. Dates Thursday, May 19 @ Hogeschool van Amsterdam Friday, May 20 @...
What’s that on the map? Problems with geo-visualization
The last couple of weeks, my data-visualization team and I, have been working on our Europeana project. Europeana is a big heritage-digitization project funded by the European Union. Their goal is to digitize all of Europe’s heritage objects and...
Visualizing what is happening
Going through an older post in the MoM’s blog referring to Walter’s Ong book “Orality and Literacy”, I discovered a term referring to a new “hybrid form” of culture that has spread on the internet: The Secondary Orality. The term is emphasizing...
The Online Love Search: A self assessment
eDarling -The new way of meeting a partner, that really suits you On their frontpage, eDarling.se suggestively guarantees its visitors a suitable match. So how does an online dating site such as eDarling set out to get to know...
Scientific referencing and hypertext: The necessity of a visual overview
This entry is meant as an introduction to the tool my group and I are developing for our Datavisualisation class. We will be trying to geographically map the rise and diffusion of different research fields over time. The reason...
Mondrian in the age of Information Visualization.
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) started painting his artworks in the style of the Amsterdam Academy. He made dark realistic landscapes and later in his carer he painted more lighter paintings when he evolved towards De Stijl. From the...
What Data Visualization Can Learn from Game Design
When reading articles and books on data visualization, the focus is often on ampiflying cognition by using external (visual) aids. In this blogpost I attempt to conduct a kind of meta-analysis on data visualization by looking beyond the content...
The Simple Ways of Information Visualization
There is no doubt that the human brain is an amazing and complex bodily organ, perhaps even the most amazing of them all. Personally, I do not think I will ever cease to be amazing by it. But, despite...
Social Inclusion through Digital Media, Medellín
In my second week in Medellín I spent some time on my project with Hiperbarrio. The organization tries to reach social inclusion through means of digital media in several depressed neighbourhoods in Medellín. By giving workshops in photography, blogging,...
Decision Making 2.0 With Data Visualization?
Can visualization influence people? I mean can we prove it? This core dilemma pondered at the heart of Enrico Bertini’s latest post on FILWD was incidentally triggered by a question from an audience member at his latest talk on data visualization....
Data Visualization and Political Elections
According to Bernhard Rieder’s presentation “The contextualized history of data / information visualization” there was always a necessity of visualizing the information we gathered throughout centuries about the world. Through the curiosity and the hunger for knowledge of the...
Uprising in India: Facebook Resistance workshop at CIS, Bangalore
Earlier this month multiple Facebook users gathered at the Centre for Internet and Society, in Bangalore, to participate in a workshop dedicated to Facebook Resistance. They were given an on-site opportunity to go beyond the laws and constraints of...
Music visualizations as a means for discovery
The basic idea behind information visualization (InfoVis) is that it takes an otherwise stagnant data set of facts and numbers and transforms into an imagery filled with visual patterns and elements. While this idea is certainly not new it...
The Fuzzy Edges
Emotion has long since been a fraught with subjectivity and complex interpretations for as long as scholars have sought to understand it. When scientists became interested in emotion in the late 19th century it suffered under labels like “feminine”,...