Information Visualization

"Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. The node and text are sized according to the number of connections. The algorithm that visualises the graph also tends to put the better connected nodes in the centre of the diagram so we the most influential philosophers, in large text, clustered in the centre. It all seems about right with the major figures in the western philosophical tradition taking the centre stage. (...) A shortcoming however is that this evaluation only takes into account direct lines of influence. (...) This is a fantastic resource which stores structured information extracted from wikepdia in a database that accessible through the web. Among other things it stores all of the information you see in an infobox on a Wikipedia page." - Amira from Bookmarklet

it's like their social graph... as if they were all on Twitter concurrently :-) - Adriano

"Humans seem to have an instinct for music. Certain songs have a quality that makes us want to tap our toes and sing along. We can’t quite say what makes good music, but we know it when we hear it. Sheet music, which tells musicians very precisely which notes to play and when, provides little clue to that mystical ingredient, but Dmitri Tymoczko [a composer in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study] has devised a new way to map music that aims to do just that. (...) Using non-Euclidean geometry and a complex figure, borrowed from string theory, called an orbifold (which can have from two to an infinite number of dimensions, depending on the number of notes being played at once), Tymoczko’s system shows how chords that are generally pleasing to the ear appear in locations close to one another, clustered close to the orbifold’s center. Sounds that the ear identifies as dissonant appear as outliers, closer to the edges. The system “allows you to translate these half-formed intuitive understandings into very precise, clear language.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn't done before." (...) "You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys," (...) "But to me," Tymoczko added, "the most satisfying aspect of this... more... - Amira

“Imagine a timeline of the universe, complete with high-resolution videos and images, in which you could zoom from a chronology of Egypt’s dynasties and pyramids to the tale of a Japanese-American couple interned in a World War II relocation camp to a discussion of a mass extinction that occurred on Earth 200 million years ago – all in seconds. (…) The idea arose in a UC Berkeley course about Big History taught by Walter Alvarez, the campus geologist who first proposed that a comet or asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs. Big History is a unified, interdisciplinary way of looking at and teaching the history of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity: the history of everything. One of the difficulties of teaching history –- and teaching Big History, in particular –- is conveying a sense of the time scale, which ranges from the 50,000-year time span of modern humans to the 13.7 billion-year history of the universe, Alvarez said. Human history... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Do you know what happens in one minute on the Internet? In just one minute, more than 204 million emails are sent. Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales. Around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr. At least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world. And more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora while more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube. Computing is transforming and touching more people in a wider range of devices. From smartphones to tablets, netbooks and notebooks and even automotive; it can often seem like every one of us is connected. But while it’s hard to miss the proliferation of portable devices, it’s what we don’t see that’s the bigger issue. (...) Today, the number of networked devices equals the world’s population. By 2015, the number of networked devices is expected to be double the world’s population. And by the time we reach 2015, it would take five years to view all the video content crossing IP networks each second." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The mobile phone has rapidly become a very essential tool that we carry with us all the time, everywhere we go. It has become the focus of our communication and information in a hyper-connected world which tolerates less and less that we disconnect or just don't have immediate access to information. Based on this conclusion the City of Geneva decided to take the challenge to visualize these digital traces created by our mobile phones. The objective of this installation is to make this data visible and allow you to explore these streams of connected people around the city, in their everyday life." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn the scale of things. “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” — Douglas Adams - Amira from Bookmarklet

See also: xkcd: Depth - Sizes accurate on a vertical log scale http://xkcd.com/485/ - Amira

"We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells." - Amira from Bookmarklet

The Words That Defined 2011 | NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2012... - Amira

LightBox 365: A Year in Photographs | TIME http://lightbox.time.com/2011... - Amira

"The Opte Project was created to make a visual representation of a space that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and esthetics/art. “Within two weeks the self-described technologist and entrepreneur Barrett Lyon had created a program that could output a detailed visualization of Internet connectivity in a few hours. Seven years and billions more Internet-connected devices later, Lyon is still at it. This cosmic-looking image, one of his newest creations, traces the millions of routes along which data can travel and pinpoints the hubs receiving the most traffic. Internet giants such as AT&T and Google manage the most heavily used networks, which appear here as glowing yellow orbs; they tend to concentrate in the center of the sphere. The less popular local networks... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"In memory of Benoit Mandelbrot: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." "Three years ago, Edge collaborated with The Serpentine Gallery in London in a program of "table-top experiments" as part of the Serpentine's Experiment Marathon . This live event was featured along with the Edge/Serpentine collaboration: "What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century." (...) The multi-dimensional Map Marathon features non-stop live presentations by over 50 artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists. The two-day event takes place in London during Frieze Art Fair week." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Money - A Chart of All of It, Where It Is and What It Can Do [xkcd.com] by Randall Munroe's webcomic xkcd is the epitome of all infographics: an immensely large chart, accompanied by some immensely small captions, that together compare the different amounts of money flowing in the world. From single dollar amounts to those huge trillion numbers that we now regularly hear about in the news, it's all included by representing the individual quantities by an accompanying number of small squares. How does 2008 global financial recession impact the US versus Europe? Where and what is the "1%"? What is the value of a solid gold toilet? How much money is spent during the elections, and on who? Or how much loose change fits in a one-gallon jug?" http://xkcd.com/980... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The map shows population density; the brightest points are the highest densities. Each country is colored according to its average annual gross national income per capita, using categories established by the World Bank (see key below). Some nations— like economic powerhouses China and India—have an especially wide range of incomes. But as the two most populous countries, both are lower middle class when income is averaged per capita." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Veracode argues that Google has better privacy, which means Facebook has more work to do to keep up. The security vendor sums up its case in an infographic that we’ve reproduced below." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Barabási updated the Erdős–Rényi model to reflect the existence of hubs in real-world networks. In doing so, he created a tool for scientists to map and explore all manner of complex systems in ways they had never thought to before. (…) “What we have to realize is that control is a natural progression of understanding processes,” he says. “But control is a question of will, and will can be controlled by laws. We have to come together as a society to figure out how far we can push it.” (...) Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks. “We’re all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thank you Ken, it turns out that Christakis' book is already on my "to-read" list. I've just checked Barabasi's Bursts: “Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.” - hmm both books seems intriguing... - Amira

"Serendipity, a trigger of exciting discoveries when we least expect it, is currently being discussed as an often neglected but still important factor in information seeking processes, research, and ideation. In this paper we explore serendipity as an information visualization goal. In particular, we introduce the Bohemian Bookshelf visualization that aims to support serendipitous exploration of digital book collections. The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five interlinked visualizations, each representing a unique (over) view of the collection. It facilitates serendipitous discoveries by (1) offering multiple access points by providing visualizations of different perspectives on the book collection, (2) enticing curiosity through abstract, metaphorical, and visually distinct representations of the collection, (3) highlighting alternate adjacencies between books, (4) providing multiple pathways for exploring the data collection in a flexible way, (5) supporting immediate previews of... more... - Amira

“For the last year, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future have been researching the future of science to identify big areas of science we think will have a transformative impact over the next decade. We read a lot of papers, conducted interviews, hosted an Open Science unconference, held an expert workshop with researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Scripps Research Institute, SETI, and private industry, and spent many weeks synthesizing what we learned. (...) The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research. (...) Every forecast could be rephrased as a “what if” question. What if you could record your dreams? What if you could design a life... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Drew Berry is a biomedical animator whose scientifically accurate and aesthetically rich visualisations reveal the microscopic world inside our bodies to a wide range of audiences. His animations have exhibited at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Royal Institute of Great Britain and the University of Geneva. In 2010 he received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Award"." More: http://tedxsydney.com/site... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"This installation endeavors to fuse the aesthetic beauty of art and science in order to create a synthesis of mind, one which is as much rational as it is fantastic. Think of this undivided mind as a prototype of human possibility-an evolutionary signal of convergence, harmony, and accelerated progress. The rest isup to us. This is a virtual simulacrum of the installation that materialized in San Francisco in November of 2010. The Imaginary Foundation is a think tank from Switzerland that does experimental research on new ways of thinking and the power of the imagination. Avoiding direct publicity, the team has sought clothing as an unlikely vehicle for bringing their ideas beyond the academic realm and into popular culture. A philosophy of research began to form: imagination as fundamental to all learning; artistic making as a model of integrating vision, materials, structure, and imagery." - Amira from Bookmarklet

#theorist - Sinan İŞLER

"This is a special guest post by Tiago Veloso from Visual Loop – a non-stop stream of Infographics, Maps, Charts and many other Visualization Goodies, with lots of new posts everyday. The year has just began, but we can surely say that the political situation in Egypt and other North African and Middle Eastern nations will be one of the major events of 2011. Despite some other big events (like the Super Bowl), a lot of attention was given to the situation in these countries, and today we bring you some of the most interesting visual resources to understand the political changes taking place in Egypt, and its impact on all the Arab nations." - Amira from Bookmarklet

I am totally disconnected from the Japanese and Italian contingent here I guess. - kendrak from Bookmarklet

No doubt David Cronenberg would be upset that Java was listed above Scanners. - Micah

At night I get a bunch of Italian & Russian down my feed, but hey, I subscribe to those folks. - anna sauce