Some of my upcom­ing events:

FIND08 work­shop Sept. 03, Torino I am just prepar­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion on the Con­tent Land­scape appli­ca­tion I designed for SVA Biz­Sphere based on my elas­tic lists. It is quite a mas­sive Flex appli­ca­tion for brows­ing and analysing thou­sands of resources. Details to come.

Bien­nale Sept. 09, Venice Watch out, we’ll show some­thing beau­ti­ful. Details to come.

MACE con­fer­ence Sept. 20–21, Venice The MACE project project goes in its final year — time to get connected!

Viz­Think 08 Oct. 13–14, Berlin I am proud to be one of the facil­i­ta­tors (~work­shop lead­ers) at the Viz­Think Con­fer­ence. I haven’t decided on a topic yet, but it might well be related to visualization(oho!) and the seman­tic web. I am really look­ing for­ward to this event, sounds like a great for­mat and the facil­i­ta­tor list is quite impres­sive already.

Xtopia Nov. 17,18, Berlin I will give an intro­duc­tory talk about visu­al­iza­tion and infor­ma­tion design at Microsoft’s Xtopia Con­fer­ence for “Busi­ness, Web Tech­nol­ogy, Design & UX”.

Busy times huh — let me know if you attend one of these events and want to meet up!

See­ing Chris Jor­dan’s TED talk (embed­ded below) just made me remem­ber his great work in visu­al­iz­ing large num­bers of things going wrong.

About his lat­est project, Run­ning the num­bers, he writes:

Run­ning the Num­bers looks at con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture through the aus­tere lens of sta­tis­tics. Each image por­trays a spe­cific quan­tity of some­thing: fif­teen mil­lion sheets of office paper (five min­utes of paper use); 106,000 alu­minum cans (thirty sec­onds of can con­sump­tion) and so on. My hope is that images rep­re­sent­ing these quan­ti­ties might have a dif­fer­ent effect than the raw num­bers alone, such as we find daily in arti­cles and books. Sta­tis­tics can feel abstract and anes­thetiz­ing, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with and make mean­ing of 3.6 mil­lion SUV sales in one year, for exam­ple, or 2.3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in prison, or 32,000 breast aug­men­ta­tion surg­eries in the U.S. every month. This project visu­ally exam­ines these vast and bizarre mea­sures of our soci­ety, in large intri­cately detailed prints assem­bled from thou­sands of smaller pho­tographs. Employ­ing themes such as the near ver­sus the far, and the one ver­sus the many, I hope to raise some ques­tions about the role of the indi­vid­ual in a soci­ety that is increas­ingly enor­mous, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and overwhelming.

David Huynh has recently joined the free­base team, after hav­ing worked on Exhibit and other SIMILE tools at MIT. His new project Par­al­lax is obvi­ously based on Exhibit (which fol­lowed mostly a faceted fil­ter­ing par­a­digm) but demon­strates a really inter­est­ing “side­wards brows­ing tech­nique” for nav­i­gat­ing related sets of dif­fer­ent types of entities.

As an exam­ple, you could start with a set of archi­tects, then fil­ter down to all mod­ern archi­tects, plot them on a map, a time­line etc. – quite nice already, but tra­di­tional facet brows­ing in prin­ci­ple. The catch how­ever, is that you can explore related col­lec­tions, like the <a href=“http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:’]);“Structures%20Designed’,p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/structures_designed))),s:(v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)))”>buildings they designed, their birth places etc. in the same manner. Very interesting principle and nicely executed, yet a bit hard to explain.

In this screencast, David explains it himself:
Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

As a side remark: academically, I think the Humboldt paper by Georgi Kobilarov first presented this principle (but they also refer to an earlier prototype of David's work). Unfortunately it was introduced under the name of pivot brows­ing, which is sort of reserved already for the quite related, but not iden­ti­cal prin­ci­ple intro­duced in dogear.

Any ideas for a good name? Side­wards brows­ing? Entity shift? Or just stick with parallax?