I will have a ses­sion at Viz­Think ’08 about visual tools for the socio-semantic web.

You can find a pod­cast inter­view with me about the ses­sion and ongo­ing work here.

The (pre­lim­i­nary) ses­sion abstract reads

In this break-out ses­sion at Viz­Think 08, Moritz Ste­faner will present visual strate­gies to under­stand and dis­cuss emer­gent infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures in the web. Phe­nom­ena like the main­stream acknowl­edge­ment of the web as a social plat­form, and the first steps towards a seman­tic web (as envi­sioned by Tim Berners-Lee a decade ago) demand for new approaches to infor­ma­tion han­dling. Fol­low­ing the research agenda for web sci­ence, visu­al­iza­tion can not only help to under­stand these emrg­ing struc­tures, but also to shape and steer inter­face design. We will dis­cuss and crit­i­cize exist­ing and cutting-edge approaches to search and brows­ing of resources and the visu­al­iza­tion of con­cep­tual structures.

So, I planned to show some of my the­sis work, and on-going work like the MACE project, and make some gen­eral posi­tions state­ments about where things should head in this area. But the rest is pretty open – for those attend­ing – what are you inter­ested in? Happy about short comments!

Btw: If you plan to reg­is­ter, use the dis­count code DCFF23 to get 50 € discount!

After much blood, sweat and cable guy issues, we could finally present the inter­ac­tive instal­la­tion mæve for the EveryVille stu­dent com­pe­ti­tion at the La Bien­nale in Venice.

In short, the instal­la­tion works like this: vis­i­tors can pick up lit­tle cards rep­re­sent­ing the exhibits. Putting them on the table will draw an asso­cia­tive, organic net­work of tags, media and related projects around them. If you put mul­ti­ple cards on the table, the visu­al­iza­tion will form “bridges”, look­ing for direct or indi­rect con­nec­tions between the projects.

The instal­la­tion has been designed and devel­oped by the MACE project team of the Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences Pots­dam and made pos­si­ble by many oth­ers (cred­its).

You can find more info and media on the mæve project web­site.

Tech­ni­cally, the instal­la­tion is built with Pro­cess­ing, using the Gestalt frame­work.
For the card track­ing, the Reac­tivi­sion 1.4 soft­ware was used. The inter­ac­tive table was built by Werk5.

By the way, if you blog about this, make sure to link to the orig­i­nal project page – not this blog post – thanks!