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.

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.

→ read more

Short notice: I will re-play my xtopia talk from yesterday today at BTK Berlin at 5pm. Partly presenting my own work, plus a discussion of visualizations around the US presidential elections.

Update: Slides are online. Will upload the missing videos (blank slides) soonish on vimeo. Please excuse the funky template, that was part of the xtopia requirements…

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!

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!

More visualization videos! The See#3 conference organized by Scholz&Volkmer took place in Wiesbaden this weekend, and luckily the streams are online. The speaker list includes Dr. Fritz Reusswig, Frank van Ham, Ben Fry, Julien de Smedt, Zachary Lieberman + Bruce Sterling.

Hey, I didn’t notice: The Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign videos are online.
Great talks from one year ago – find my old comments here.

The ECTEL 08 webpage is online. I take credit for the clean design and the animal theme – maybe a bit unexpected for a technology enhanced learning conference, but I found it fit the motto quite well.

Thanks to Marco Kalz and Marcus Specht for the great cooperation, and especially for recommending drupal.

Call for papers (April 1st)