For those from the Stuttgart area: I will give a public (german) talk on Monday, April 20, 6:30pm at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd on information aesthetics and my work.

Update: lecture slides here. Thanks to Eric Rodenbeck and the other see#4 speakers for some last minute inspirations!

We recently launched a whole new version of the MACE portal. MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) is a pan-european initiative to interconnect and disseminate digital information about architecture. The idea is to connect and enrich various databases containing eLearning material for architectural contents and to connect and make them accessible in novel ways. The project is co-funded by the European commission. If you are more interested in the background of the project, you can also view our info page here. Personally, I am working half of my time on this project here at FH Potsdam.

So, let me give you a little overview of the portal:
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Together with Sebastian Ferré, I defined and illustrated some common navigation modes in faceted search and web applications dealing with metadata+resources in general for an upcoming publication. I am here sharing the gist of it already, as I believe these could be interesting for many of you.

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Today was a good day, so I thought I would share its results immediately, instead of fine-tuning forever – who knows when I find the time anyways!

I built a little facet browser for the New York Times Article Search API – an impressively fast faceted search engine covering over two million articles. So, give it a spin!

Some caveats:

• Don’t look for the page navigation – there is none. Pure laziness, will update it soon.
• The initial counts are based on a search for “the” (which I figured would appear in all articles). Unfortunately, only the top 15 or so values per facet are returned, so you cannot click, e.g. the year 2008 in the beginning. Will fix.
• The API has a request limit of 5000 queries per day. So if your requests don’t work – come back tomorrow morning :)
• Unfortunately, the API seems to support only one value per facet. So, all facets are single-select.(fixed, see comments).

The code is based on my totally revamped elastic lists prototype. I used this project as a little sandbox experiment of how easy customization is possible, and especially how to make a switch from a fully client-based to a server–based filtering model.

I put up a new portfolio site at moritz.stefaner.eu. Not really finished, but good enough. You might be especially interested in the Content Landscape documentation, as I have not written about this project before.

After lots of experiments with drupal, indexhibit and wordpress, I finally settled for the simple and elegant frog cms. Highly recommended, if you want to fill a custom layout with dynamic content in a very flexible manner.

I just came back from the great workshop “The Scent of Information” organized by the visualization gang from LBI Linz. (program + live-blog)
Here are the slides from my talk. Basically, I was presenting Andrew vande Moere’s and Andrea Lau’s triangle model of information aesthetics, and showed mostly well-formed.eigenfactor and briefly some of my thesis work.

Some striking nature-inspired generative visualizations can be found over at Imitate and informate. From the site:

This is an experimental visualization project. We are inspired by nature or other real phenomena and try to transform formal aspects of it into data visualization systems.

Imitate and Informate is a project by Cedric Kiefer and Christopher Warnow. It emerged from a course called “Reality in Virtuality” at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Danijela Djokic.

Finally, the results of a cooperation with the guys from eigenfactor are online!

For the impatient: here’s the direct link: http://well-formed.eigenfactor.org

The site features 4 different visualizations, trying different approaches to mapping information flow and citation structure in the sciences.

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New (german) video up at vimeo:

Alumni-Diskussionsrunde – 5 Jahre Interface-Design

A recording of the alumni panel at the fifth anniversary of the interface design programme at FH Potsdam. Featuring Carolin Nagel, Andreas Zecher, Jens-Ove Panknin, Timm Kekeritz, and me.

Alumni-Diskussionsrunde – 5 Jahre Interface-Design from Boris Müller on Vimeo.

Haven’t watched it yet, but I guess it’s good :)

Happy new year everyone!

The video from my (german) xtopia talk is online. You need either the silverlight browser plugin to play it back, or you can download a high res version directly (144MB). And here are the slides.

Update: Here it is on vimeo as well. More web-friendly.

I speak about my work for the MACE project, and other ongoing work as well as some of the US election visualizations. The talk was fun and also received quite well; in the audience evaluation, I scored 7.88 (out of 9) for presentation style, 8.33 for competence, 7.85 for content of the presentation and 6.82 for business relevance.

In other news, things are a bit cumbersome at the moment, because I broke my leg and this will take a while to heal… But, it gives me the time to work on my portfolio page, which should be online soon.