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.

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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!

Just a lit­tle pointer to an ongo­ing project: [edit: » The lat­est ver­sion can be found here «]

I am cur­rently work­ing on sim­i­lar­ity (correlation-based) nav­i­ga­tion mech­a­nisms for tags and other nom­i­nal meta­data and a trend mea­sure (kind of hinted at in the inter­ac­tive ver­sion with the green col­ors). I will soon post an update and a few explanations.

Tag Clouds 5.0 (Ger­man doc­u­men­ta­tion at incom.org)

Inter­ac­tive demo (outdated)

I would be happy if you could con­tribute your del.icio.us, ma.gnolia or furl tags, if you use one of these pub­lic book­mark­ing ser­vices. In this case, just do the fol­low­ing; it’s a one minute thing:

1. Go to https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?
2. The browser will ask you for your deli­cious user­name and password.
3. As a response, you will get an XML file con­tain­ing all your posts. The browser page might look blank, but if you take a look at the source code, you will see it’s an XML file.
4. Send me the file (copy paste source code into a text file or save directly) along with a short notice, if you want it pub­lished in future exper­i­ments (with your user­name or anonymized).

As a side prod­uct of my work on web feed visu­al­iza­tion, I made a small com­par­i­son of dif­fer­ent ways to deal with tem­po­ral infor­ma­tion in lists of micro­con­tent, such as e.g. blog entries.

(larger ver­sion of the image)

1) Ordered list with­out gaps: Clearly, the most space-efficient solu­tion — how­ever, only tem­po­ral order­ing is pre­served and not tem­po­ral struc­ture. It is not visu­ally evi­dent how the items are dis­trib­uted over time.

2) Cal­en­dar: Each time unit (days for exam­ple) has equal space assigned, regard­less if there are items assigned or not. A pre­cise dis­play, how­ever, very space-inefficient, since a lot of the dis­play space is typ­i­cally used for dis­play­ing “nothing”.

3) Accor­dion: Sim­i­lar to cal­en­dar view, but empty time units are dis­played on much less screen estate. This gives a pretty good first-glance impres­sion of large gaps and close-together items. How­ever, depend­ing on the tem­po­ral struc­ture, there might still be large streaks of wasted space for large gaps.

4) Folded gaps: This is the solu­tion I pro­pose (and which I believe is novel. If oth­er­wise, I would be happy about a short notice!): Tem­po­ral gaps are dis­played as if a part of the list was folded to the back of the dis­play. Short gaps have almost the same size as in accor­dion view. Long gaps are larger, but do not grow lin­early, but with the square root of the num­ber of empty time units. Visu­ally, this is jus­ti­fied by intro­duc­ing shad­ing to indi­cate that the “orig­i­nal mate­r­ial” is folded to the back. Fold­ing also pro­vides a plau­si­ble model for inter­ac­tive adjust­ments such as reg­u­lat­ing the gap size.

To sup­port my argu­ment, I also made small demon­stra­tor based on actual web feed data. It takes a while to load (~700k of data), so please be patient. On the left, you have a menu for select­ing dif­fer­ent feeds. On the right, I drew a con­nec­tion of each item to a cal­en­dar with fancy curved lines. You can adjust the size of the dis­played items with the zoom slider.

Let me know if it works for you — tech­ni­cally and conceptually!

I am a big fan of the Micro­for­mats ini­ta­tive. From the site:

Designed for humans first and machines sec­ond, micro­for­mats are a set of sim­ple, open data for­mats built upon exist­ing and widely adopted stan­dards. Instead of throw­ing away what works today, micro­for­mats intend to solve sim­pler prob­lems first by adapt­ing to cur­rent behav­iors and usage pat­terns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

So essen­tially, the idea is: if you write a review (like I did below), announce an event, post a per­son or job pro­file — do it in a stan­dard­ized way, so it can be reused and aggre­gated. The good thing is that there are lots of edi­tors and read­ers already out there. So for exam­ple you can use the Tails Fire­fox Exten­sion to auto­mat­i­cally add events men­tioned on web pages to your cal­en­dar or save address cards etc. End­less pos­si­bil­i­ties of seam­less data interaction.

I use the Struc­tured Blog­ging Plu­gin for Word­Press to have ready-made forms for post­ing reviews. For the book review, I just entered the title and it grabbed all the meta-data from Ama­zon. Melikes!

<div class='hreview x-wpsb-review-book'>        <div>           <h3 class='item fn'><a class='url' href='http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%3FASIN=1401302378%26tag=ws%26lcode=xm2%26cID=2025%26ccmID=165953%26location=/o/ASIN/1401302378%253FSubscriptionId=1GJZ3WSF1JX2981GW3R2'>The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More</a></h3>          <p><div><img src="http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1401302378.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_V63383464_.jpg"/></div></p>           <div><b>Rating</b>: <span class="rating">5</span> out of 5<div class="sb-fullstar"> </div><div class="sb-fullstar"> </div><div class="sb-fullstar"> </div><div class="sb-fullstar"> </div><div class="sb-fullstar"> </div><div style="clear: left"></div></div>         <p><b>Author</b>: Chris Anderson</p>                        <p><b>Year</b>: 2006</p>                        <p><b>Publisher</b>: Hyperion</p>                       <p><b>ISBN</b>: <span class='Z3988' title='ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book&rft.isbn=1401302378'>1401302378</span></p>     </div>      <div class='description'><p>Maybe the most fascinating read I had this year. Chris Anderson comes up with a very conclusive model how web commerce and communication differ from their "real-world" counterparts and what effects that has. Essentially, he shows that the common "80-20" rule (that most of the money/attention is spend on a few blockbusters) is not valid anymore in the web world. Rather, successful online shops make most of their money with niche products, each sold very seldomly. But there is literally millions of them — together with the cheapness of storage and distribution, outsiders are suddenly profitable. The same trend can be observed in the blogosphere, where individuals publish information independent of large media corporations.

This book had huge impact, in fact the long tail dia­gram has become an icon of the whole bottom-up, grass­roots, ama­teurs vs. pros, wis­dom of the crowds trend we expe­ri­enced over the last years. For my work, the whole devel­op­ment has high rel­e­vance: If every­body is hunt­ing the cool stuff besides the main­stream, puz­zling together his per­sonal taste mostly made up of widely unknown stuff, this requires dif­fer­ent par­a­digms for brows­ing, stor­ing and dis­cov­ery. I think it will take another cou­ple of years, until we under­stand, what the “social media” rev­o­lu­tion is about — besides big typo and beta badges.

Hereby I declare this blog as offi­cially OPENED!

I am myself curi­ous where it will lead me — my moti­va­tion is to share my thoughts, dis­cov­er­ies and exper­i­ments I will do while work­ing on my Master’s the­sis in Inter­face Design at FH Pots­dam with you. But occa­sion­ally, I might also just post related infor­ma­tion or reviews of things I dis­cover. Shar­ing is caring!

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