Curation in the Age of Abundance “A curator is an information chemist. He or she mix atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.” – Scoble One of some buzzwords from SXSWEDU 2012 is “educators as curators”. With lots of Web2.0 curation tools available, what does it mean to be a curator? What’s the difference between an aggregator and a curator ? Visual Communication Identity GNP+ is the global network for and by people living with HIV. As a network of networks they are driven by the needs of people living with HIV worldwide. Showcases on Datavisualization Interactively Explore the YOLO Flip 12 Feb 2014 Showcases Animation, Interactive, Process, Sports In preparation of the Winter Olympic Games 2014 in Sochi, we helped the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung publish a long-form article about Iouri Podladtchikov, a professional snowboarder and – since yesterday – freshly baked Olympic gold medalist. To help readers better understand the sport, we created a series of illustrations and an interactive animation. Read more Analyzing Presidential Candidate’s Body Language
There’s Life Left In Delicious Yet For a long time, the web-based social bookmarking service Delicious was a poster child for the Web 2.0 movement. It was open, collaborative and full of the tags and user-generated content that made VCs instinctively open up their checkbooks at the time. It’s been 10 years, since the service opened to the public – then still running on the del.icio.us domain – and while it’s changed owners a few times since, it’s still up and running and its original concept hasn’t changed all that much. OECD – Your Better Life Index Average personal index for Germany, men, 15–24 How’s life? There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life. Download executive summary Download the index data Learn more about the index Better Life BlogArchive Happiness pays
Datasets on Datavisualization Wikileaks US Embassy Cables 29 Nov 2010 Datasets Infographic, Politics Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. Here's how media outlets strive to make the data more accessible than its original form. Read more New Twitter Data from Infochimps Muzio’s beautiful iOS app makes it easier than ever to curate & share memories What's next in mobile? Find out at MobileBeat, VentureBeat's 7th annual event on the future of mobile, on July 8-9 in San Francisco. Register now and save $400!
Moodwall / Studio Klink and Urban Alliance Media architecture collective Urban Alliance has recently finished the Moodwall: a 24 meter long interactive light installation in Amsterdam. The Moodwall is situated in a pedestrian tunnel and interacts with people passing by, improving the atmosphere in the tunnel and making people happy and feel less unsafe. The interactive urban wallpaper is built out of about 2500 leds behind a ribbed semi-transparent wall. The curves in the wall make it less suitable for grafitti and improve the visibility of the content for the side. The resolution is horizontally stretched so the images of the screen are better for the side so people are stimulated to watch the screen from outside the tunnel. This prevents the tunnel to become a hang-out spot.
Working with Data in Protovis on Datavisualization Protovis is an open-source Javascript visualization library by the Stanford Visualization Group and has become one of the preferred tools in our arsenal. If you want to get started with the popular toolkit too, Jerome Cukier has a comprehensive tutorial about how to work with data in Protovis. The tutorial is split in five parts covering using (1, 2), sorting (3) and reshaping (4) arrays as well as how to structure data to work with complex structures like treemaps or force-directed layouts (5). 9 lessons about the web and business from Pearltrees, the or Pearltrees is a French startup that wants to change the way we organise the web. Describing how it works would lead you to believe that it’s another social bookmarking site, which would do them injustice. Most of the social bookmarks are organized either alphabetically or chronologically, which doesn’t do much good when you try to retrieve stuff later. Also, due to how most social bookmarking sites were designed, they’ve become more like a curated list of the hottest headlines out there right now, and about what Mashable calls “velocity” – the question: how fast is this thing spreading? This idea of velocity is not what Pearltrees is about – on the contrary, it’s a tool that helps you keep an eye on context and history in the endless stream of blogs, tweets and Facebook posts.
Nicola Triscott Lise Autogena + Joshua Portway, Most Blue Skies (2010) I’m currently at ISEA2012, the 18th International Symposium on Electronic Art, a six-day international conference, this year taking place in Albuquerque under the glorious banner ‘Machine Wilderness’, which references the New Mexico region as an area of rapid growth and technology within vast expanses of open land. Astrophysicist and President of the Leonardo Institute for Art, Science and Technology, Roger Malina gave a keynote to a packed auditorium, in which he discussed (in a rich and wide-ranging lecture) the epistemological revolution that is underway with the arrival of the era of “big data”. The amount of data in our world has exploded, Malina explained. Today, each day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (source: IBM).
featured projects Quantified Other Five weeks of my father's Nike Fuel data Tatelets Generative bracelet based on artworks from Tate Modern Threads Market data as never seen before Visual Browser About the application Visual Browser is a Java application that can visualize the data in RDF scheme. The main principle of the visualization is that: the triple (resource, resource, resource) is represented by two nodes connected by an edge the triple (resource, resource, literal) is represented by a hint (small window appearing on mouse over the subject node) the triple (resource, resource, literal) can be represented by the length of the edge (between resource and resource) if the literal can be converted to a number Visual Browser uses the Jena framework to obtain the data, since the RDF scheme can be saved in different forms (a single XML file or a relational database). The visualization engine is derived from TouchGraph LLC.