June 11th, 2007

Thesis

This is an overview of the visu­al­iza­tion and inter­ac­tion exper­i­ments I pro­duced for my Mas­ters The­sis “Visual tools for the socio–semantic web” (.pdf, 12MB).

Elas­tic tag maps

tag_maps_update.png
› demo

Elas­tic tag maps visu­al­ize the com­plex rela­tion­ships emerg­ing between tags (free-form key­words used to describe dig­i­tal resources). The lay­out algo­rithm puts tags that are fre­quently used together closer together on a 2D plane. Tech­ni­cally, this is accom­plished by a com­bi­na­tion of prin­ci­ple com­po­nents analy­sis (PCA) and curvi­lin­ear com­po­nent analy­sis (CCA). On rollover, tags that tend to co–occur with the selected tag are brought to the front. Click­ing allows to lock tags and explore their seman­tic con­text fur­ther, with­out los­ing focus.

› blog post

Elas­tic tag lists

list.png
› demo

Elas­tic tag lists apply the same prin­ci­ple as the elas­tic tag maps, but only in one dimen­sion. (Click the list tab in the demo)

Emerg­ing topics

dynamics.png
› demo

Clas­si­cal tag clouds fail to show how top­ics appear and dis­ap­pear over time. Based on a mem­ory model, where tags “age” over time and are finally “for­got­ten”, if not used any­more, this visu­al­iza­tion shows the evo­lu­tion of users’ tag­ging vocabularies.

› blog post

Emerg­ing top­ics (animation)

tags_animated.png
› demo

The tem­po­ral dynam­ics of tag­ging shown in an ani­mated tag cloud.

Fold­ing time

folding.png
› demo

What is in between a list and a lin­ear time plot? A com­par­i­son of approaches to visu­al­iz­ing tem­po­ral rhythms in web feeds.

› blog post

Lifestream mashup

twitter.jpg
› demo

Ground­ing time visu­al­iza­tion in per­sonal expe­ri­ence, and pick­ing up the mash–up idea, a visu­al­iza­tion of hourly web­cam shots, along with his del.icio.us book­marks and short twit­ter com­ments is com­bined in a uni­fied doc­u­men­ta­tion of dig­i­tal activity.

› blog post

You say… we say…

ysws.png
(not web ver­sion (yet?), expla­na­tion here)

How do indi­vid­u­als use tags — com­pared to the com­mu­nity? Do you use pri­vate lan­guage or are you a main­stream tag­ger? When you tag with “design” — do the oth­ers think it is “art”?

› blog post

Elas­tic lists for facet browsers

nobel.png
› demo

A demon­stra­tion of the “elas­tic list” prin­ci­ple for brows­ing multi-facetted data struc­tures. Click any num­ber of list entries to query the data­base for a com­bi­na­tion of the selected attrib­utes. If you cre­ate an “impos­si­ble” con­fig­u­ra­tion, your selec­tion will be reduced until a match is possible.

Elas­tic lists enhance tra­di­tional facet brows­ing approaches by • visu­al­iz­ing rel­a­tive pro­por­tions (weights) of meta­data val­ues by size • visu­al­iz­ing unusu­al­ness of a meta­data weight by bright­ness • and ani­mated fil­ter­ing transitions.

› blog post

Elas­tic lists and faceted brows­ing for tags

nobel.png
› demo

A tool for brows­ing tag struc­tures based on facets is cur­rently devel­oped. At the moment, it is a semi–functional pro­to­type. It is based on the obser­va­tion, that some users cre­ate typed tags already, by using syn­tac­tic delim­iters, such as colons or slashes (e.g. “for:tinax” or “by:Weinberger”). Accord­ingly, the appli­ca­tion imports exist­ing tag col­lec­tions (in the given exam­ple, del.icio.us book­marks) and groups the tags accord­ing to these delim­iters. Default facets are “all tags” and “top tags”, which selects the top used tags, since they rep­re­sent impor­tant entry points to the sub–collections. The nav­i­ga­tion prin­ci­ple fol­lows the elas­tic list prin­ci­ple as intro­duced above.

KONDUIT

konduit.jpg
› demo (taks a while to load!)

A novel feed reader com­bin­ing the pre­sented prin­ci­ples in a desk­top appli­ca­tion. Every meta­data value (such as author, date, feed, tag) has an intrin­sic tem­po­ral dimen­sion and is acti­vated or col­lapsed accord­ing to the cur­rent selec­tion con­text. Con­cep­tu­ally, every meta­data value or action in the appli­ca­tion is treated as a feed (or tag, respec­tively), which are in turn grouped in facets.

Screen­shots: Ini­tial view Hot links Tag­ging Search

Fur­ther aspects of the con­cep­tual model, visu­al­iza­tion and inter­ac­tion prin­ci­ples are described in my the­sis. (.pdf, 12MB).

See also

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23 Responses to 'Thesis'

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  1. struschie
    August 23rd, 2007 at 10:13 pm

    Her­zlichen Glück­wun­sch — bestechende geniale Visualisierungen.

  2. Michael Koch
    October 12th, 2007 at 7:38 pm

    Echt klasse — sehr inspiri­erend und lesenswert. Ich habe erstens sel­ten eine bessere (und Buzzword-freie) Ein­führung in das Thema Web 2.0 / Social Soft­ware gefun­den als Ihr Kapi­tel 2 — und die Designs in Kapi­tel 4 gehen auch weit über das hin­aus, das bisher Stand-der-Technik ist — da würde ich gern einiges von umsetzen.

  3. Stefan Apelt
    October 18th, 2007 at 10:05 am

    Sehr beein­druck­end, deine Arbeit, ger­ade wenn man — wie ich — design­tech­nisch zwei linke Hände hat. Ich bin schon ges­pannt, womit du uns als Näch­stes verblüffst. :)

  4. Daniele Galiffa
    October 26th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    As always…inspiring and mar­vel­lous solutions.

    Con­grat­u­la­tions!

  5. Moritz Stefaner
    January 29th, 2008 at 10:51 am

    I updated some of the links, added the blog ref­er­ences and espe­cially: uploaded the Kon­duit demo and shots! Hope­fully, I will find the time to blog about it soon…

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    May 26th, 2008 at 6:21 pm

    […] Behrens; — “Prac­ti­cal Tools for Explor­ing Data and Mod­els” por Hadley Wick­ham; — “Visual Tools for the Socio-semantic Web” por Moritz Ste­faner; — “Com­pu­ta­tional Infor­ma­tion Design” por Ben […]

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  12. sumanpark's me2DAY
    June 14th, 2008 at 8:24 am

    만박의 생각…

    visual tools for socio-semantic web 중에 “emerg­ing topic” 좋네.…

  13. Andrew Kraftsow
    June 20th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    Are you avail­able for some free­lance work? We are in the lit­i­ga­tion sup­port busi­ness and have new soft­ware that is all about tags. We see strong appli­ca­tion for your work in giv­ing users dif­fer­ent sorts of rela­tional insights into the very large data sets we host (10M+ pages each).

  14. scott romack
    July 1st, 2008 at 5:41 pm

    very nice! we are doing research in the same space as you. is your source code open source?

    thanks,

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    September 22nd, 2008 at 8:35 pm

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  17. chiara
    December 1st, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    Con­grat­u­la­tions! very inter­est­ing thesis

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  22. Amber Rose Kandarian
    April 12th, 2010 at 11:36 pm

    This is a great the­sis. Please con­tact me if you would like to turn it into a short doc­u­men­tary we are accept­ing the­sis project abstracts now. Thank you! http://www.DocuThesis.com ’Chang­ing the World One Frame at a Time’ Doc­u­men­tary meets the Master’s Thesis!

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About

My name is Moritz Stefaner. I am interested in information aesthetics, interactive visualization, and how the web transforms our understanding of information.

I hold a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science and an M.A. in Interface Design.

I work as a freelance information visualizer. Find my portfolio at moritz.stefaner.eu

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