Well-formed data

Some interesting work from the Bergstrom Lab at the department of Biology(!), University of Washington.

(PDF version here, more info here)

Based on citation patterns, they calculated an information flow model of how scientific disciplines are influencing each other. While I cannot follow all the technical details, I really appreciate the well-designed diagrams. Quite interesting to see an “a posteriori” order of scientific disciplines based on the actual flow of information!

An explanation of the diagrams from the eigenfactor.org:

Orange circles represent fields, with larger, darker circles indicating larger field size as measured by eigenfactor. Blue arrows represent citation flow between fields. An arrow from field A to field B indicates citation traffic from A to B, with larger, darker arrows indicating higher citation volume.

The map was creating using our information flow method for mapping large networks. Using data from Thomson Scientific’s 2004 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), we partitioned 6128 journals connected by 6,434,916 citations into 88 modules. For visual simplcity, we show only the most important links, namely those that a random surfer traverses at least once in 5000 steps, and the modules that are connected by these links.

There is also an interactive version online based on my good old Relation Browser. But honestly, I think the diagrams work much better.

Overall a great example of interdisciplinary research, where presentation and information design play together nicely with interesting+relevant analysis – exemplary!

I am currently using my baby-time-off-my-university-job to get my options sorted out for further research. The MACE project is running for another year, so the big decision is, if+how to pursue a PhD. At my home base FHP, formally, I cannot do a PhD. So, at least, I have to find a good Ph.D. supervisor at a “real” university.

For this purpose, I started to map all institutions and people that could be candidates or helpful or interesting to meet on Google maps.

I am not 100% clear about both the mode and the scope of the thesis. But I think it is safe to say I would love to advance design research in visualization of the social web.

If you - prosumer you are - have any additional ideas of who I could get in touch with, or could even imagine supervising my thesis, I would be very happy about additional spots on the map or a little comment here. Thanks!

Congratulations to Christian for another yummy Master’s thesis from FH Potsdam: The Form of Facts and Figures. He collected, organized and commented on a variety of information design and visualization patterns.

I do hope he will put a pdf online!

I am back from a little excursion to the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for media art research in Linz. I gave a talk on visualization and my master’s thesis.

Here are the slides (german). Most of the external references are linked (click on the pictures).

Thanks to Mario Röhrle and Dietmar Offenhuber for the invitation!

I started a tumblelog, aggregating my del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter blurbs (not that many) and my FFFFOUND pictures.

(If you are not familiar with the notion of tumblelogs, wikipedia has a short article about them)

We had to say goodbye to a great person.

Although finished already over a week ago, some words on the Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign organized by the Interface Design Program at FH Potsdam (where I happen to study). To put it short: It was a blast!

Especially remarkable:

• The design concept of the conference itself: excellently conceived and executed with love to detail. See monomo for some pictures. Props and respect to formdusche

• The line-up was really impressive - find complete coverage of the talks at wmmna. Lots of pictures also on flickr, especially James King’s scribbled coverage of some of the talks — here’s the one of the 10 minute talk I gave together with Fabian at the student’s panel:

• Bruce Sterling’s talk was, as expected, “something completely different” and he really hit the nail on the head a couple of times:

Never thinking about it again is the ideal relationship of a normal human being and an object. That is the opposite of how designers think. I realized this when I was teaching at Art Center College of Design. My students were doing media design, some of them, and very commonly they would come out with some gizmo on a neck pendant. “See, the user wears this large device dangling around his neck, and…”

“No,” I would tell them, “your design project is not hung around the user’s neck. The user has other uses for his neck. This project is hung around YOUR neck. You’re the designer, you’re the one who has to obsess about the device, not them.” You obsess MORE. Let them obsess LESS.

Read Shaping Things if you haven’t yet.

Other than that, Anthony Dunne, Bernard Kerr and Tim Edler really impressed me.

An inspiring event, I wish we could have that every year!

I have been subscribed to the indexed blog for a couple of weeks now and really, it never ceases to amaze me. Hands down, this is one of the most funny, original and yet deepest blogs I have seen.

The concept is simple: little stories or facts about life are told with infographics drawn on index cards (which I love anyways). Its amazing how much laughs or “true, true”s you can get out of little Venn or axis diagrams:

Reminds me also of the wonderful Facts of life by Pippo Lionni.

When working with academic papers, you encounter the same old problems everybody has with digital data organization: categorize by author, date, topic, method or journal? Additionally, you have to keep track of the references for citation.
So I decided to try out one of the new public bookmarking tools for academic research: citeulike and connotea.

(more…)

The MACE project website is online as a first version:

The MACE project sets out to transform the ways of e-learning about architecture in Europe. It will integrate vast amounts of content from diverse repositories created in several large previous projects as well as from existing architectural design communities.
MACE will provide a framework for community based services such as finding, acquiring, using and discussing about e-learning contents that were previously reachable only to small user groups. […] The project will develop and use several types of metadata for tagging contents: traditional content metadata and ontologies, context metadata, competence metadata and learning process metadata, usage related metadata and metadata acquired through social interaction, e.g. recommendations by peer users or blog entries.

I am engaged on the project as a part-time researcher here at FHP. A terrific chance to get some really good interfaces going, especially since there is a lot of data, even more metadata and a powerful consortium involved. I am looking forward to it!