The exhibition – well curated by Victoria Szabo – featured a nice selection of a broad range of works, both from the usual suspects like stamen and Boris Müller, but also quite some works I was not yet familiar with. I especially enjoyed newsknitter, c-loc, the fabulous synchronous objects and Rhythm Analysis: A Temporal Stereopsis of Urban Telecommunication Data Topography.

I had a short presentation (slides) on Monday morning in front of roughly 70 people. I presented some of the process and rationale behind the well-formed.eigenfactor project, gave an overview of the data analysis and ended with some “outtakes” of discontinued approaches and my favorite bug screenshots, as I get a lot of inspiration out of bad code. Thanks to Nicole Coleman for the good organization and moderation!

The project talks were followed by a panel in the afternoon, where I was delighted to see, among others, Andrew Vande Moere and Kennth Huff talk about their work and perspective on infosthetics. Overall, however, the panel was very broad in topic and in sum, lacking a central question or some red lines. For the years to come, it might be an idea to tie panels, talks and exhibitions closer together.

The days flew by and it was a great experience to be at SIGGRAPH and the Big Easy – New Orleans. Jazz and Blues everywhere and a real good vibe. Made some new friends, learned a lot, and the scotch and music in the dba were not shabby either.

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!

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!

This time, it was the EC-TEL07 (European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning) in Crete. Elisa Dalla Vecchia and I presented the MACE project (slides, video 1, video 2) and besides, met a lot of nice people.

The conference itself was really well organized. The keynotes (Hermann Maurer and Bruce Sterling) were excellent and big picture, covering a wide range of digital lifestyle topics and wild ideas. Digital quacks & charlatans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepathy is trivial, flying cars. No kidding. Many of the session talks, on the other hand, were not that exciting at all. I have the feeling many people in this area first build a “framework for…” before actually trying out some ideas on real learners.

More info on the conference blog, wiki and the flickr stream.

Greetings to Martin Memmel from DFKI, who I met to talk about the ALOE project and Christian Glahn, who presented nice work on Smart Indicators for learner feedback, and Joris Klerkx, who is quite into information visualization. I am looking forward to future developments, guys!

And just for the record, here are my favorite insider nerd joke conference memes:

• Magic doesn’t scale.
• Minigolf? Ouzome!
• “Everything is a platform” — freaky!
• Telepathy is trivial.
• “Anyways — back to me”