The first talk in the conference was from Alexis Ohanian one of the founders of Reddit. His talk focused on the role of online community in the decisions about PIPA and SOPA in the US congress. He pointed the mobilization that took place inside the Reddit community and the real world impact of the discussion and also the manifestations that it leaded to. He stated that he used the Reddit platform and community to decide what would be his main arguments in meetings with North American politicians in Washington.

Andrew Keen talked about his new book, Digital Vertigo, that is coming out this May. In his talk in the conference he spoke a lot about privacy issues and his concerns about how the lost of privacy may affect our identity. The title of the book is a reference to Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo. According to him there is no social online because of narcissism and everyone is just showing off in online communities there is no interest in others. He said that the level of exposure that we have today generates a new kind of puritanism.

Another interesting talk was the one from Hilary Mason. She works at Bit.ly in New York and spoke about how the data scientists in the company analyze their databases. Bit.ly is one of the main URL shortening services in the web. They are active since 2009 and collecting information from the links that pass through the site. All their information is stored in databases and they are able to analyze users activity by tracing the number of times that links were shared and clicked. They publish some of their studies in their blog and more technical explanations about their systems in their engineering blog.

Christian Hernandez works at Facebook as the director of platform partnership. He was there to talk about the Facebook API and stimulate the startup’s developers to use the new features in their applications. According to him the new features bring many advantages to the application as the API enable them to create posts about the users’ activities in their Facebook timelines and make it visible their friends in the social network. Hernandez defended that this feedback from the applications to Facebook created a loop that increased exponentially the visibility of the application bringing new users to it.

Robert Scoble in opposition to Andrew Keen presented a very optimistic vision of the future of social networks and mobile applications. According to him applications are going to be able to gather more information about our life as they are developed and privacy is something that we will overcome. He treats privacy not as an issue and defended that the real problem will be that people will be addicted to those systems. He presented some examples of mobile applications such as Waze and Placeme that use geolocation to help people move in urban spaces, Homesnap that provide detailed information about any house in the US using as an input a picture of the facade. He pointed to the surprise and astonishment that people react when confronted to the amount of information that are available to anyone about their life, but pointed that the benefits that one can get from those services overcome the worries and it is much more likely that addiction to these same services become a much bigger problem than privacy issues.

Many interesting and innovative projects were presented in the conference. They addressed different issues and publics but social integration and creation of contact networks was a common feature between many of them. The discussions were around the uses of social networks for business models. In The Next Web blog there are some of the talks already available and others will be posted soon.

Vrijdag 27 april vond het eerste evenement van Foam Lab 2012 plaats: ‘Deleted / Seen’. Een avond die de bezoekers een blik laat werpen op beeld dat vandaag de dag wordt ondergewaardeerd door de aanwezigheid van imperfecties. Glitch art was hier met andere woorden een belangrijk thema; ‘het presenteren van digitale fouten als kunst’.

Bij aankomst op de Keizersgracht valt op hoe er een groepje mensen vrolijk staat te praten voor de ingang van de indrukwekkende entree van Foam. De gezellige sfeer is hierdoor bij aankomst al direct merkbaar. Bij het betreden van het gebouw worden we hartelijk ontvangen door een medewerkster die uitlegt wat het programma is en waar wij heen kunnen gaan. Wanneer wij via een trap afdalen naar beneden lopen we een bruisende menigte tegemoet. We arriveren in een gang waar onze nieuwsgierigheid meteen wordt gewekt door drie verschillende sferen en ruimtes waar wij een blik in kunnen werpen. Recht voor ons uit wordt er gedanst en geborreld in een gezellig en vol zaaltje. Ruben Jacobs is hier aan het draaien en zorgt voor een feestelijke en ontspannen sfeer. Rechts kunnen we doorlopen naar een bar die met een glazenwand gescheiden is van het dansgedeelte, en links zien we aan het einde van de gang een ruimte waar aan een lijn allerlei foto’s hangen. Nieuwsgierig begeven wij ons naar de helder verlichte ruimte aan de linkerkant met het vermoeden dat wij hier op een tentoonstelling van beeldmaterialen zullen gaan stuiten. Hoewel dit blijkt te kloppen gezien de slinger aan foto’s (als we dichterbij komen zien wij dat het zwart-wit scans zijn), is dit slechts een deel van wat hier gebeurd. Midden in de ruimte staat een apparaat met een doek er overheen waar een rij mensen al pratend en lachend voor staat te wachten. Het doek gaat omhoog en de volgende persoon kruipt eronder. Plotseling heb ik een flash back van mijn bezoeken als kind aan de orthodontist. Hier moest ik onder een zwart doek op een stang bijten waarna een enorm röntgen apparaat een foto van mijn gebit maakte. Een fototechniek die de mogelijkheid bood om alle imperfecties in mijn gebit inzichtelijk te maken.

Het apparaat waar ik nu voorsta gaat echter nog veel verder dan de röntgencamera uit mijn kinderjaren. Wanneer ik er achter probeer te komen wat er gebeurd beschrijft iemand uit de rij het aan mij als ‘je gezicht tegen een spiegel drukken en een foto laten maken’. Een ander noemt het ‘de kans om digitaal met jezelf te zoenen’. Wanneer ik de lijn met scans afloop doen ze me ook denken aan de gezichten van Siamese tweelingen waarbij de ene foto nog misvormdere gelaatstrekken afbeeldt dan de andere. Het lijkt of men hier een wedstrijd doet wie het lelijkste en meest misvormde hoofd van zichzelf afgebeeld kan krijgen. Het continu gelach en gegrinnik van mensen die scans ontvangen en de vrienden er omheen maakt de sfeer in deze ruimte extra komisch en uitgelaten.

Het komische aspect neemt nog meer toe wanneer wij merken dat we verder kunnen lopen naar een aparte hoek waar ‘The Deletor’ staat. Een geheel zwart gekleed meisje met een bivakmuts staat achter een tafel waarop vele verschillende gereedschappen liggen. Een hamer, een deegroller, een tang, een verfkwasten et cetera. Bezoekers voor ons hebben een complete tentoonstelling van de door hen vernietigde voorwerpen achtergelaten met daarbij briefjes waarop verklaringen staan voor het deleten.

Een jongen naast ons vertelt met een grijns dat hij een kado heeft meegenomen voor een jarige vriend die niet is komen opdagen. Hij haalt een plastic bril uit zijn binnenzak en overhandigt deze aan The Deletor. Deze vraagt de jongen vriendelijk met welk gereedschap hij de bril wil laten vernietigen. De jongen wijst naar de deegroller waarna The Deletor hem serieus toe knikt, zelf een beschermingsbril opzet en vervolgens he-le-maal los gaat op haar nieuwe project. Het gebonk, geknal en geknars roept duidelijk meer toeschouwers want binnen enkele tellen is het druk geworden rondom de tafel. Mensen kijken eerst enigszins verbaast wanneer ze komen aanlopen maar beginnen daarna al snel te lachen. Iemand merkt benijdend op dat het ‘heerlijk moet zijn om de hele avond dingen te mogen slopen’. Nog meer hilariteit ontstaat er rond de tafel wanneer blijkt dat de bril nog helemal niet zo makkelijk te ‘deleten’ valt.

Na een danspasje in de danszaal en een borrel aan de bar kom ik tot de conclusie dat de avond in het museum een bijzonder karakter heeft. Dit komt vooral doordat het programma zich merendeels richt op participatie. De combinatie van workshops, dans, tentoonstellingen en de vele mogelijkheden tot het leveren van eigen bijdragen is een unieke formule die iedere bezoeker lijkt te enthousiasmeren wat uiteindelijk zorgt voor een uiterst vermakelijke avond. Door de bijdragen van de bezoekers direct tentoon te stellen wordt er in een offline omgeving een Web 2.0 strategie gehanteerd. Deze strategie is op haar beurt door het artificeren van onder andere digitale effecten niet alleen bijzonder origineel, het is ook nog eens geheel in lijn met het thema ‘glitch art’ van de avond.

Hoewel ik Foam tot nu toe vooral kende als een artistiek museum met oog voor detail én de schoonheid van fotografie, begrijp ik na deze avond dat Foam, en met name Foam Lab 2012 nog veel diverser en veelzijdiger is dan dat. Dit eerste evenement beloofd dan ook veel goeds voor de rest van het jaar. Mijn tip is daarom om de website en kalender van Foam Lab in de gaten te houden om op de hoogte te blijven van volgende evenementen en gebeurtenissen.

“Foam Lab is een groep creatieve jongeren die geselecteerd is door Foam om experimentele projecten en culturele evenementen rondom fotografie te ontwikkelen voor een jong publiek” (Website Foam Lab 2012).

Written By Jesse Oyegbesan, Aurelie Ghalim, Ula Jurgiel & Clément Adam

Defining Bioart

Today’s technology, art and sciences are evolving at great speed. The important changes to these fields have introduced new ways to think and engage into the different disciplines, creating new links between them.
BioArt is a recent practice, which has emerged along with the combined evolution of various fields of study. People have a tendency to label everything, but in the case of bioart, categories overlap each other. Zylinska (2009) defines bioart as art that is “utilizing biomaterial such as tissue, blood, or genes as its medium” (Zylinska, 2009). BioArt is thus a general term to talk about art that uses a living medium. Thacker (2005) describes bioart as “often used to refer to projects that deal with biology as an artistic medium” (Thacker, 2005). Anne Munster (2005) describes “bioart” as “… a relatively new nomenclature” describing “…an area of aesthetic practice that takes in a number of approaches ranging from the selective breeding of irises to the production of transgenic organisms in art work”.

The Debate over BioArt

The traditional distinctions between science and art are blurred so that political and social criticism comes up consistently. “Bioart” and its interdisciplinary projects, however encounters a lot of resistance. Debates concerning the ethics of “bioart” or if it is even “terrorism” are not fading away. Zylinska (2009) states, that the reasons for this resistance may be lead back to the “current transformation of human and nonhuman life and its mediation by technology.”
For certain people, using a living medium for art is not the only requirement for bioart: it should also draw attention to different social and political aspects of our society.

Bioart has received many critics since its first appearance in the end of the 20th century. Indeed, when the symbolic and material boundaries of humans opened to technology, some considered it as hospitable, however many (especially the general public) found it offensive or even dangerous. One of the main concerns about bioart is that people view it as an unnecessary use of living organisms. While the use of living (in vivo) organisms is often tolerated because they are used for research and thus improving the quality of peoples’ lives, bioart is often criticized as an uncalled-for practice because of the role of aesthetics in the artworks. In addition, bioart creates uncertainties among the public because bioart projects such as eugenics are undertaken by artists and not researchers. Nevertheless it is important to bear in mind that (bio)artists also need to do research prior to conducting their experiment/artwork. Furthermore, in theory, money is far from being the main motivation for artists to conduct an artwork.

Zylinska denounces the monetary drive involved in the process of eugenics and bioart in the following quote: “If big science can ignore nuclear holocaust and species annihilation, it seems very safe to assume that concerns about eugenics or any of the other possible flesh catastrophes are not going to be very meaningful in its deliberations about flesh machinepolicy and practice. Without question, it is in the interest of pancapitalism to rationalize the flesh, and consequently it is in the financial interest of big science to see that this desire manifests itself in the world” (Zylinska, 2009). Zylinska uses in this quote her own definition of ‘pancapitalism’ : “an identifiable network of (evil) forces against and outside which artists can take a clear and principled stand” (Zylinska, 2009).

The big sciences, as addressed by Zylinska, refers to the major biotech companies. The quote puts forward a critic about the way the biotech industry values life and power.

Bioartists are thus often criticized as irresponsible, and lacking ethics. When Eduardo Kac released a picture of a fluorescent green rabbit, many denounced the act as immoral and harmful for the animal.

Munster (2005) in her article “Why is BioArt Not Terrorism?” firstly describes the case of Steve Kurtz, one of the co-founders of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). In 2004 Kurtz was accused of using biological materials in order to produce bio-terrorist weapons. All the investigations undertaken by the FBI could be lead back to the “post 9/11 anxiety”. However, Munster (2005) also responds to Mark Lombardi’s art work BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91 (4th Version). Lombardi was obsessed of discovering intrigues of governments, connections between governments, corporation and mafia activities. He collected his findings and illustrated them on paintings. Above-mentioned art work, however, became an important matter of the FBI right after 9/11 as Lombardi apparently had relevant information concerning Al Qaeda.

Munster (2005) detects no connection between Kurtz’s and Lombardi case, even though both “are concerned with aspects of the politics and finance of corporate globalization.”

“If anything links these two events at all, it is simply that in the broader sphere of public culture in the US (rather than in its more insulated art world), the political status of art is no longer determined by recourse to the politics of the artist or to the platform promoted by the work’s content. Art now becomes ‘political’ when it catches the attention of a policing agency.”(Munster 2005)

Art Works

GFP (green fluorescent protein) Bunny, 2000 by Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac’s art work “GFP Bunny Project”, in which a rabbit received an injection with a green fluorescent gene from a jellyfish, so that it was glowing when illuminated with a special type of ultra violet light, opened a huge debate. Even though Kac defended himself by saying, that he had done nothing that other scientist had not done before and that the experiment was totally harmless to the rabbit, however a bitter aftertaste in this case still remains. As the modification of genes was already successfully tested before the question arose, what the contribution of “GFP Bunny project” was. Zylinska (2009) tries to offer an explanation of his actions by saying that Kac intended to play the role as an educator in order to provide “…new insights into our understanding of genetics”. Her claims that bio-tech companies keep secrets of their progress due to financial and political interests may demonstrate a connection.

Flesh Machine, 1997  by CAE

Some could ask where is the line between being an artist and scientist while talking about BioArt. CAE (Critical Art Ensemble) the collective of tactical media practitioners at one point in 1997 made a performance called Flesh Machine where they gave a 30 minutes long lecture about new reproductive technology. They then allowed participants to take donor screening tests and asked some of them to give their blood for DNA extraction and amplification. On the side they prepared a lab where cell samples were taken for flash freezing and later participants could asses the potential value of their bodies as commodities and hence their place in the new genetic market economy. To do all that and prepare for their performance CAE studied in biology labs to learn cryopreservation and biopsy techniques. They lived with and documented a couple going through in vitro fertilization treatment and they studied material science to learn how to build a cryolab. Their aim was to reveal what they considered to be hidden eugenic agendas, most apparent on the intimate level of the literal procedure. After cell-sharing experience, CAE presented to their audience a frozen embryo that they inherited from a couple who no longer needed their eggs. A live image of the embryo was projected onto a screen. The image had a clock marking the time the embryo had until it was “evicted” from its clinical cryotank. If enough money was raised to pay the rent (around $60) on the cryotank through the performance, the embryo would remain alive. If nobody would buy it, it would die. CAE wanted to take donations from the audience. Every performance has ended with the death of the embryo. This part of the performance, in CAE opinion was speaking for itself.

Body Modification for Love, 2005 by Michiko Nitta

Another example of BioArt is Michiko Nitta’s Body Modification for Love. It is an idea which could be developed in the future – a technique for genetically growing selected parts of another (beloved) person on another person’s skin. What Nitta is proposing is for example a nipple of ex-girlfriend or a mole of ex-boyfriend. Patch of living hair would be also possible to grow on somebody’s else arm. It is supposed to be a new form of tattoo. Would you like to get one?

inthewrongplaceness, 2009 by Kira O’Reilly

Kira O’Reilly is famous for her performances involving blood-letting. In order to do that she is helping herself with medical instruments such as scalpel, leeches or wet cups – Wet Cup is one of her performances where she is becoming a sculpture and she let her blood go to cups attached to her cut open skin. In this piece O’Reilly wanted to compare human body to a cup which in her opinion main function is to carry the fluid of life. In her other performance “inthewrongplaceness” (2009) she asked the audience to approach one by one and touch her and dead pig’s skin and find the similarities. It was her way to engage the audience with the complexities of the relation between skin, touch and species.

Que le cheval vive en moi, 2011 by Art Orienté Objet

Art Orienté Objet in 2011 made a controversial performance “Que le cheval vive en moi” (“May the horse live in me”) where they wanted to get an impression how it is to be a horse. They tried to find out by preparing the artist’s body over the course of several months by allowing it to be injected with horse immunoglobulins, the glycoproteins that circulate in the blood serum and which can function as antibodies in immune response. The artist called the process “mithridatization” after Mithridates VI of Pontus who cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sublethal doses of the same. After having progressively built up her tolerance to the foreign animal bodies, she was injected with horse blood plasma containing the entire spectrum of foreign immunoglobulins. Because of the preparation for many months she did not fall into anaphylactic shock which is a natural allergic reaction and what she would experience without the preparation. Horse immunoglobulins passed the defensive mechanisms of her own human immune system, entered her blood stream to bond with the proteins of her body and as a result of this synthesis have an effect on all major body functions. Even impacting the nervous system, so that the artist, during and in the weeks after the performance, experienced not only alterations in her physiological rhythm but also of her consciousness. Afterwards she said she had “the feeling of being extra human”. She said she was not in her usual body, that she was hyper–powerful, hyper–sensitive, hyper–nervous and very diffident. She said that she could not sleep and she assured that she  probably felt a bit like a horse.

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Biojewellery

Biojewllery resulted from a project in which couples donate their bone cells to a team of researchers. By using bioglass and a special bioactive ceramic, which mimics the structure of bone material, researchers are growing rings made out of the couples’ bone.

Smell, 2007 by James Auger

Click here to view the embedded video.

The project “Smell” is about the human experimental potential of the sense of smell, applying contemporary scientific research in a range of domestic and social contexts.

DNA portraits, ongoing by  DNA 11

DNA11 pioneered the application of genetic science in the creation of truly personalized unique custom art. Their DNA portraits allow customers to buy portraits created using the customer’s very own DNA. Just as a person’s DNA is unique, each frame is created according to the person’s DNA, making the frame one of a kind. Nevertheless for this company, and in contradiction to traditional bioart, the rentability of selling the artwork seems to outweigh the eventual politics (charities) they are involved in.

Sources

Munster, A. (2005) Why Is BioArt Not Terrorism?: Some Critical Nodes in the Networks of Infomatice Life, Culture Machine Vol 7.

Schneider, R. (2000). Nomadmedia: On Critical Art Ensemble. In TDR, Vol. 44, No. 4 (pp.120-131). The MIT Press.

Thacker, E. (2005). Conclusion: Tactical Media and BioArt. In The Global Genome Biotechnology, Politics and Culture (pp. 305-­‐320). London.

Zylinska, J. (2009). Green Bunnies and Speaking Ears: The Ethics of Bioart . In J. Zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media (pp. 149-­‐174). London: The MIT Press.

Extra readings

Symbiotica

Presenters:
Hans Ubbink → http://hansubbink.com/
Remy Harrewijn (Festina Lente Collective) → http://festinalentecollective.com/
Agata Jaworska → http://agatajaworska.withtank.com/
Erik Klein Wolterink → http://erikkleinwolterink.nl/
Carlo Maria Morsiani (IABLU) → http://candelabrum2.tumblr.com/
Niki Smit (Monobanda) → http://monobanda.nl/
Maria Zendrera → http://ontheroadoperation.net/
André Dekker (Observatorium) → http://observatorium.org/
Leon Römer → http://leonromer.nl/
Arnout Visser → http://arnoutvisser.com/
Thomas Le Gras (Stadsboeren) → http://stadsboeren.org/
Gijs van Kooten (Colorbleed) → http://colorbleed.nl/

Breaks will be filled with funky tunes and lovely visuals by Studio Stennis (http://studiostennis.nl). You will also be astounded with fabulously inspiring presenters, great music to dance to and so many interesting people in one space at one time, you’ll wish you had more time to speak to all of them! Doors open at 20:00, PechaKucha starts at 21:00.

PechaKucha Amsterdam #21
Tuesday 24 April 2012 at Trouw (Wibautstraat 127, Amsterdam) → http://trouwamsterdam.nl
Open: 20:00, start: 21:00.
Tickets: 8 euros, availabe at the door (150 tickets) and in presale (200 tickets). Click here to buy: http://bit.ly/IEgxx3
Click here to attend the event on Facebook and to invite friends: http://www.facebook.com/events/287822767950373/

Become a fan: http://facebook.com/pechakuchanightamsterdam
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/pechakucha_ams
Brand-new website: http://pechakuchaamsterdam.nl

Alberto Cairo: ethical implications of infographics

Streaming from Miami, where he teaches infographics to journalists with no previous experience in this field, Alberto Cairo offered the first talk of the afternoon. There are three steps for a good visualization, according to him: “It must be functional as a hammer, multilayered as an onion and beautiful and true as a mathematical equation.”

Cairo made some valuable remarks on the relation between good visualizations and good journalism: data, as he stated, must be properly encoded because doing it in ways that “obscure your infographics have ethical implications.” In other words: some visualizations, like bubble charts, are worse than others for specific purposes. They might be good for showing patterns or trends, but not to show areas and compare them. Cairo opens the door to beginners by inviting them to experiment with easy-to-use applications: “Many of my graphs are made with a little bit of Excel and a little bit of Illustrator, you can still make good graphics using low technology tools.”

Jan Willem Tulp: the power of practice

The second guest speaker of Show Me the Data 2012 was Jan Willem Tulp, a well-known Dutch interactive designer who started his own company last year, after one decade of programming and designing for others. Winner of the 2011 Eyeo Challenge for his project Ghost Counties, Tulp explained his working process. He usually gets a first sense of the data in an early stage, while building preliminary visualizations through an explorative process: “Quite often I feel that I need more data, or a different kind of exploration, so I return to early stages.”  Trial and error methods must be applied: “It’s even good to fail in the preliminary visualizations because it does give you ideas for other approaches.”

As somebody that has just started his own business, audience was waiting for his advice on how to start a professional career in data visualization: “The last year I worked for my former boss I devoted one day a week to participate in contests, attend conferences and connect with people.” Practice is also compulsory: “It’s also a matter of exercising: play with the applications and get feedback from others.”

Bas Broekhuizen: learning from other disciplines

Bas Broekhuizen closed the conference with his vision on how e-learning research could help and improve data visualization design.  He quoted some principles stated by Richard E. Mayer. Internal coherence is needed, as well as pre-training people: is better for readers to know the main concepts beforehand. Also, attention guides to specific parts of the display must be applied: layovers and contextual menus, as well as splash pages, are useful in this sense.

Broekhuizen, who is currently teaching at the University of Amsterdam, gave his opinion on the eternal debate about the use of the words “infographics” and “data visualization.”  He prefers the first term, because it has been used by journalists since the decade of 1970, although a live debate with the audience present at Show Me the Data led to the same conclusion as previous debates on this topic: everybody will keep on using their preferred term.

The three guest speakers’ talks were the perfect ‘side dish’ for the ‘main course’, composed by the students’ applications. The projects introduced in Show Me the Data were built during eight weeks in multidisciplinary teams with 4-5 members from the masters in New Media, Editorial Design and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Amsterdam and the Utrecht Graduate School of Arts. They address different topics using various visualization tools. Here is a summary of them:

EU 2020 TARGETS MONITOR

This project went “from critiquing a EU program with data to critiquing the EU program on data.” The official EU 2020 Program delivers a growth strategy for this decade in seven fields like employment, education and climate change. It has its own website with visualizations, but the team considered that it lacked context, had confusing graphs and was not useful for comparison between countries.

The new application aims to solve these problems, adding also algorithmic predictions based on available data from Eurostat. Users can select different targets and countries, and see their behavior through two different visualizations, a choropleth map and a histogram. According to their own conclusions, the EU 2020 Targets Monitor is a tool that “supports existing narratives, shows the complexity of EU politics and raises awareness on gaps inside the EU data program.”

NYC NEIGHBORHOOD EXPLORER

Moving to a new city and finding a good neighborhood is hard. The New York City Neighborhood Explorer is a visual tool that aims to help newcomers to New York in finding living areas that suit their expectations. It is based on data retrieved from NYC Open Data and distributed around seven categories like the availability of parking slots and the air quality. Every value had its own dataset with information from 262 zip codes.

The NYC Neighborhood Explorer shows an interactive chloropleth map that changes colours according to the relevance given by the user to the seven targets. Additional information from every area can be accessed when rolling over it with the mouse. With this tool, the team has been able to “test the reliability of NYC Open Data policy” and aims to build new versions with more accurate data and the possibility of applying this idea to different cities.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS FLOW

Is it possible to talk about flows between countries without maps? Of course, and this application shows how to do it. The team behind International Students Flow did not want to use them “because of possible overshadowing between small and large countries.” The objective of this project is quite clear: to visually represent the movement of education-related human migrations throughout the world.

Based on Javascript, HTML, D3 and Google interfaces, this application consists of a chord diagram showing the countries as circles and the continents as clusters whose flows are highlighted when rolled over.  The motion chart on the right gives a more detailed view on certain aspects, like the cost of living. With this application is easy to see how colonial and linguistic ties push many students to certain countries.

HAPPY DATA

Happiness is as subjective as beauty is: we all have our own concept and whatever increases our joy can be something horrible for other people. All over the world, different organizations have researched happiness and they all lead to different results. This team wanted to “let the user have their say in what they define as well-being” and help them in finding which countries suit better their preferences. Data comes from different organizations and surveys.

Happy Data shows a clickable world map with a list of countries and a parallel coordinates graph with the performance of every country for every given factor. Some of them are serious, like GDP, and others are more trivial but nevertheless relevant, like the average price of a pint. Users can select the most relevant factors according to their thoughts and the list of countries will be reduced to those offering the desired life conditions. According to their authors, “the tool provides a way to quickly consume data for 30 factors, with information available for 130 countries.”

SOILAR

“A sunny opportunity for emerging countries.” The goal of this project is as simple as effective: proving how developing nations, big consumers of fossil energies, are also geographically placed in ideal locations for solar energy that could benefit them and the whole planet. Their visualization is supported by data from NASA, the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre and the US Energy Information Administration.

Users of Soilar can select an emerging country and see what is its performance concerning renewable and fossil energies. If, for instance, country A makes a full use of its X kWh/m² daily solar power, it could reduce up to Y tons/m² its daily CO₂ emissions. The application shows a world map with the solar power potential and the level of CO₂ emissions, as well as a stream graph with the historic evolution of fossil fuel production and consumption.

BEATMAP

Cultural content is relevant in Wikipedia. Its quantitative presence is similar in numbers to politics-related content, but what kind of articles are there? Do they reflect the variety of cultural movements across the world? In order to cast some light on this topic, this team has developed an application that traces the origins of music genres through space and time according to Wikipedia. Beatmap offers information on 32,000 albums corresponding to 600 music genres with data downloaded from DBpedia.

The application shows a force directed graph with music genres. Users can explore this visualization and select up to three genres. Their geographical and historical evolution can be seen in the second visualization, a world map exaggerated according to the data in which bubbles represent the number of related albums recorded every year in a specific location. According to their authors, “without the filtering abilities gained by this visualization, the data itself would be too comprehensive to easily explore at these various levels.”

Show Me the Data 2012 is available online in two separate videos (this and this) with all the talks and presentations.

Obama’s presedential campaign promised increased transparency. When he took office one of the first actions he took was the signing of a memo, pledging his administration to “an unprecedented level of openness in government”. While this pledge may not have reached its fullest potential on many levels, When Obama took office in 2008, the contrast with his unpopular predessor in terms of the intentions at openness and transparency was still striking. In his memo Obama layed out three ambitious ground principles for his administration.

Government should be transparent.

Government should be participatory.

Government should be collaborative.

It isn’t just Obama’s refreshing rhetoric abilities that strive for reaching the goals set out in the memo. From the start he surrounded himself with (technical) tools that enhance transparent governance through visual companions. The highpoint of data visualization in the recent Obama years was the online steam of the State of the Union address of 2011. It was enthousiastically announced on the White House as “something you’ve never seen before“, accompanying the regular online live stream were data visualizations concerning key points of the speech, neatly streaming along with the president’s talking points.

Enhanced state of the union slide

These visually pleasing and appealing charts are an effective way to spin ultimately complex issues into simple arrays of bars and circles. While this method certainly lends itself for better access to very dense data, the inevitable simplifications are a vessel for politically charged misrepresentations of the facts. Some graphs are just an illusive spin on the political and economic reality. An info graphic on the nation debt is essentially just focused on a visually effective comparison between the Bush years and the recent years of the Obama administration.

Job loss graph

In a reaction to recent media attention and political backlash over the surging gas prices, the Whitehouse released an info graphic to put the debate to rest. The same visualizations are used in a speech in which Obama holds up a detail of the info graphic on a piece of cardboard. Again the most prominent feature here is the stark contrast between the GOP red (Bush years, depressing low bars) and the democratic blue (Obama years, higher bars!). While the visualizations are a welcome addition in promoting transparency and of the socio-economial state of the nation, the persuasive, political function that they ultimately have turn them into a flat and highly biased simplifications of current affairs.

Obama holding chart to get point across

That data visualizations are an integral part of Obama’s persuasion strategy was further underlined when he appointed Edward Tufte in early 2010 to help to help provide transparency on where 787 billion in stimulus tax money was going. One of tasks of the board that Tufte is part of is maintaining recovery.org, a governmental website that provides insight into the billions of tax money injected into the suffering economy of the US, this is better known as the “Recovery Act” or “the Stimulus”. Tufte’s influence is clearly visible as the website relies on various visualizations to offer glimpses into the vast dataset on governmental spendings. The remarkable thing is that Tufte was not hired as a designer, but as a watchdog of values that were put so clearly forward in that early memo. The Obama administration clearly recognized the importance of visual design for transparency when Tufte got the call. Head of the board, Earl Devaney, remarked “It had been a nontransparent ride for me — being in Washington for 37 years”. Tufte was brought in to change that sentiment, ”I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency”, he answered on why he accepted the position. There is also critique, Jerry Brito who maintains stimuluswatch.org “What we want is the raw data. We don’t need another beautiful site”.

The intertwining of data visualization and governmental policy is something that is firmly established in the history of data visualization. It was social scientist William Playfair that dramatically improved the graphs that we use today. As the inventer of the bar graph, one of his original graphs was on the interest of national debt. It was intended as a critique on England’s policy of financing colonial wars through national debt.

Playfairs critical national debt graph

Datavis pioneer and philosopher Otto Neurath had a clear didactic mission, he belied that “visual education is related to the extension of intellectual democracy within single communities and within mankind” and set out to educate the people on current socio-economic issues. On the political spectrum, Neurath himself held a socialist political position that shined through in his work which often tried to portray social  and economical issues, often consequences of governmental policy, of which the unknowing citizen was at the center of. In more recent days: The quest for educating the public is at the heart of TED favorite Hans Roslings organization, Gapminder. Gapminder is a non-profit venture which is actively using data visualizations in order to promote a “fact based world view”. All these pioneers were highly politically engaged and had similar missions: To educate the public through easy to comprehend visualizations and they all had a clear political point of reference. Neurath was more than just a producer of graphs, the content of the graph mattered politically. Edward Tufte is an advocate for certain didactic values, not just a designer. These political potentialities have been recognized by the Obama administration. It has effectively used the same tactics that were developed to critique governmental policy, to use as persuasion techniques under the banner of “transparency”. Wether this actually makes governmental policies and consequences more transparent or just obscures complexity, is something that is up for debate. Either way: Readers of data visualization should be aware of the choices in data and depiction that precede the actual chart. For every chart, there is another one that puts the available data in a different light. Nathan Yau, author of Visualize This, warningly remarks to the address of makers of data visualizations:

By focusing on one part of the data, you might inadvertently obscure another. However, if you’re careful, get to know the data that you’re dealing with, and stay true to what’s there, then it should be easier to overcome bias.

This is of course advice that any political designer of data visualization will easily neglect. The advice then should be directed at other designers out there: Get to know the data and make alternative representations of the same facts. This way any visual argumentation can be answered by a counter argument in form af another visualization. What’s interesting is wether the GOP will pick up data visualization as part of its presidential campaign. We might just witness chart wars in the coming election…

Referred articles & books
- Engelhardt, Yuri. Graphics with a cause – Neurath, Rosling, and the universal principles of visual representations (2012)
- Few, Stephen. Now You See It (2009)
- Yau, Nathan. Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (2011)

Brands are increasingly looking into data visualizations as a means to engage their customers online.

AdAge, March 2009:

Today’s consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new “visual scientists” who are turning bits and bytes of data — once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders — into stories for our digital age.

AdAge, August 2010:

We can and should think of DaViz as part of the brand’s sense of intuition — that charming and ancient analog quality. Intuition allows us to cut through the clutter and the data overload, observe, perceive and deduct knowledge or understanding that appears to come out of nowhere. In a similar way, data visualization allows us to focus and personalize our engagement platforms and communications with consumers around the essence of the brand’s value and message.

General Electric, February 2012:

We try really hard to draw a distinction between data visualization and infographics. There are times when each is appropriate. When we have a lot of data, we create bigger, more interactive, graphics. We are getting much more sophisticated, and over the past couple of years we have become more sophisticated in terms of how we use the data. And consumers are more sophisticated in how they view the data. They are raising the bar, so we have to work harder and smarter about how we do projects like this.

Furthermore, there is at least one creative agency that specializes in digital brand storytelling through data visualizations – Jess3. It has worked on projects such as Google Politics & Elections, Foursqure’s badge ‘I voted’, The Economist’s Women Economic Opportunity Index, etc.

Volkswagen, Visa, General Electric among others also use data visualizations to enhance their brand communication. The benefit of this trend is that companies open their rich data sets and share them with the public, albeit in a controlled way. Conversely, there is a critical point to be made about the power of such visualis. As Roland Barthes writes:

Pictures… are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analyzing or diluting it.

In this sense, there is a lack of research on power dynamics in data visualizations, created by brands. (For more on bias in data visualizations, see Jorrit Schaap’s take and Yeun Au’s post.)

That’s why in my thesis I will study techniques of power in data visualizations. Research will extend Ben and Marthalee Barton’s critique of technical and professional visuals. It states:

Technical and professional visuals are not only instruments of communication or even of knowledge but also instruments of power.

Foucault’s idea that “power to dominate rests on the differential possession of knowledge”, or the benefit to monitor without being seen, will be central to my research on branded data visualizations.

For instance, let’s have a look at US carrier Sprint’s Now network. It displays an overwhelming set of live data about the current state of the world. For example, the number of coffee cups being produced or top Google searches today. Although the visualization is primarily focused on USA, it attempts to create a global impact by displaying information about the current time in Tanzania, for instance.

Ideally, the visualization fosters the image of Sprint as an infrastructure company of the future that carries information people care about.  But it also brings to mind displays in industrial control rooms. Every widget can be classified as, what researcher Larry Goodstein calls, “one measurement – one indication.” This may be viewed in Foucauldian terms as overreliance on a “display system based exclusively on the analytic mode of surveillance” (Barton and Barton). As Goodstein points out, because of the thousands of individual displays stacked together, people often have difficulties in “seeing the forest for the trees.” His observation was derived from his reconstruction of the reasons behind the disastrous incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in 1979. Since hundreds of individual indicators annunciated in the first minutes of the crisis, operators failed to identify the cause of the problem.

Another bias in Sprint’s visualization can be seen in its ordering of information. As internet researchers such as Jakob Nielsen claim, users start reading a webpage from its upper left section (F-shape). This is exactly where one can see most data about Sprint services. More imbalances of power emerge when one reads the terms of use. The visualization is not interactive and users can not order or play with the widgets, although they can upload a webcam video of themselves. So this paragraph from the terms of use is striking:

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Sprint and its affiliates and their respective parents, directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims, actions, demands, damages, costs, liabilities, losses and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of your use of the Site.

Though Now seems comprehensive enough to claim it displays the world as it is, visitors are discouraged to make judgements based on the data.

My study will focus only on visualization projects updated frequently by their creators. Although data visualizations are praised by analysts as a new tool to engage customers, some companies do not view them as long-term projects. For instance, Visa’s Go project showed how many people were smiling back currently at Mona Lisa, thus emphasizing the credit company’s role in helping people “go places and do things.” However, the visualization is no longer available and appears to be a product of a campaign-like behaviour.

There are at least two subquestions related to power about the surge in publishing of branded data visualizations. For instance, when did companies get interested in publishing information visualizations and why? Do they outsource the creation of visualizations or they build them in-house?

Challenges to this research are assessing what is not a branded data visualization and finding an appropriate method to study their employment of power. Another difficulty might be identifying newer media theory discourses that could be connected to a research on branded data visualizations because Barton’s work dates from the 1990s.

References

Barthes, R. Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970.

Barton, B., Barton M. “Modes of Power in Technical and Professional Visuals.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7.1 (1993): 138-162.

Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Goodstein, L. “Discriminative Display Support for Process Operators.” Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures. Ed. J. Rasmussen and W.B.Rouse. New York: Plenum, 1981. 433-449.

Data visualizations are subject to an intricate relationship between intention and communication. The communication part should present the data in such a way that the intention of the visualization becomes clear to the audience. For traditional data visualization teams working with separate researchers and graphic designers it is obviously important yet challenging for everyone in the team to understand the intent of the visualization and to translate this to a successful design. But even with single person teams – using modern tools like Many Eyes to create visualizations – the safeguarding of the connection between intention and communication may be no easy task. In a way similar to Yuri Engelhardt’s exploration of the universal building blocks of data visualizations (Engelhardt 2012, forthcoming), other authors have looked for models to mediate the intentional representation and selection of graphical techniques (Kerpedjiev et al. 1998) and the relationships between data and style elements (Steier et al. 2012). Hoping to find ways to connect intention to communication, these texts look for a fail-proof translation of data into design. However, both in the production and in the reception stages of data visualizations an important factor comes into play that may cause some serious problems: cultural bias. What follows is my take on dealing with this potential problem using theories derived from existing academic literature.

Cultural bias

In The Risks of Visualisation, a paper by Sabrina Bresciani and Martin Eppler, the authors explore the possible disadvantages of data visualization. For this they created a classification table that “is a matrix based on two disadvantage causes (designer or user induced) and three types of effects (cognitive, emotional, social)” (Bresciani and Eppler 2008: 8). Many of the listed problems are issues that may result from the choices made in the process of visualizing the data. Most of the effects can be traced back to bad design choices. However, some of the stated effects refer to more cultural issues. The authors explore one of these issues more in-depth, namely cultural and cross-cultural differences. They state that:

These are pitfalls related to the social environment and induced by the heterogeneity of users, due to the fact that the meaning of symbols and colours are not universal. Hence some graphic representations may be misinterpreted in other cultural contexts. [...] Westerners tend to focus strongly on the foreground, while east-Asian people focus on the whole picture and the background [...]; in some eastern countries time is shown from right to left and the meanings of red and green are not identical to their use in the western world. (Bresciani and Eppler 2008: 12)

Here we clearly see issues that come into play in an age wherein data visualization tools and their resulting visualizations easily travel the world. The cultural meaning of any color, symbol, image and depiction may vary greatly across producers and users. The different cultural background of the audience may effect and instigate narratives and conclusions that the creator of the visualization never expected nor intended with his design. Clearly, decisions made in the design process of data visualizations should be about more than aesthetics and should also be based on human communication research. More importantly, producers of these visualizations should be very self-reflexive on these matters.

Cultural biases may effect the use of many elements like colors, graphics, icons, texts and maps (for critiques of the use of the culturally biased Mercator projection in maps, see Yeun Au’s post on this blog and the Kartograph framework). No matter how good the intentions of picture languages like Otto Neurath’s Isotype are (with Neurath’s famous motto “words divide, pictures unite” (Neurath 1973: 217)) any visualization holds a great variety of possible cultural readings by its user. Roland Barthes discusses this notion in his Rhetoric of the image:

“[T]he variation in readings is not, however, anarchic: it depends on the different kinds of knowledge – practical, national, cultural, aesthetic – invested in the image [by the reader]. […] [R]eading closely depends on my culture, on my knowledge of the world.” (Barthes 1977)

This knowledge of the world is connected to culture and the historical moment. Furthermore it may be affected by class, race, gender generation and sexuality. (Storey 2006: 97). This cultural meaning (derived from one’s cultural knowledge of the world) is historic and thus the meaning of any symbol may change over time. In their article on the feedback loops surrounding the transfer of meaning from culture to product to consumers, Nancy Spears et al. come up with the symbolic communications model. This model entails the slowly changing cultural meaning of a product through the impact of its consumers. (Spears et al. 1996) In a less commercial setting, one could think of the changing meaning of the Swastika symbol, which was already used in ancient times (possibly to depict the sun) but through its association with Nazism received a new cultural meaning and is even outlawed as a symbol in Germany (more on Wikipedia).

A way of explaining the possible problems of visualization and different cultural readings is through Barthes’ concept of the myth. Data visualization elements like icons and images can all be seen as myths. A myth is an ideographic system that describes an idea without explicitly stating a fact. However, when a person reads a myth, he or she assumes the signification as a truth. Yet this “truth” is nothing more than the meaning assigned to the myth by the person. This again is affected by the cultural background of the person and the historical moment. In many cases a myth will transfer a dominant reading that might be accepted by the person without over-thinking it, yet when the person actively applies an oppositional reading a new and different meaning may be derived. Barthes discusses the use of text to affect possible meanings of images. The concept of relay explains how text that adopts a meaning that is already present in the image may increase the possibility that this meaning is accepted by the audience (in the case of the Swastika, one could write “Ancient Indian ornament” next to the image, instead of leaving it open to interpretation as a symbol of Nazism). The concept of anchorage on the other hand expands the array of meanings by adding a meaning that was unavailable to derive from the image on its own. Both ways force a certain connotative meaning on the audience. In data visualization, a legend of a map explaining the color coding scheme may use relay to explain the meaning of colors (red: not on track, green: on track) or anchorage (red: has bought an iPod, green: has bought an iPhone). The text steers the user towards a meaning. But again, the actual meaning the viewer will assign to the symbol, color, image etc. depends on his cultural background. (Storey 2006: 92-98)

The theory of color deserves a full length article on its own due to its importance and omnipresent use, but very briefly one could say that any color can be split into a symbolic value, an emotional value and a signal value. An example of the symbolic value of a color is the “color” white for mourning or its opposite celebration, depending on one’s culture. The emotional value is often affected by age, mood and personal history. Generally speaking children like brighter colors (red, yellow, orange) while older people prefer pastel colors. Finally, the signal value instantly sends certain intelligence to a user, like the red, green and orange colors of traffic lights. Again, this color coding may differ amongst cultures. (Michels en van Thiel 2006: 38-39)

In this graph depicting the US budget deficits under the Bush and Obama administrations, the red and blue colors resemble the colors of the political parties of each president. Yet, the red color of Bush’s Republican administration does not translate well to the graph. Even though the deficit under Obama is much worse, the combination of a line graph and the color red usually indicates something negative and thus gives a more negative feel to the part of the graph depicting the Bush deficit than Obama’s. At least to my culturally biased eyes. A US citizen accustomed to the party colors may not have this association.

Conclusions

In order to create effective data visualizations, one should define the audience and target groups of the project. The cultural meaning of colors, texts and graphics may vary greatly amongst different audiences. At the same time, the producers of visualizations should be self-reflexive about their own cultural biases. Why were certain colors chosen, images picked, projection models used? These questions should then be juxtaposed to questions of how these colors and images will be received by the target audience. Through techniques like relay and anchorage, one may try to promote connotative meanings.

In the end, it’s the users of the data visualization that should be provided a means of gaining insights and empowerment in a visually appealing and understandable way. To reach this goal, the connection between intention and communication should be in the mind of data visualization producers at all times.

References

• Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977.
• Bresciani, Sabrina and Martin Eppler. “The Risks of Visualization. A Classification of Disadvantages Associated with Graphic Representations of Information.” Knowledge- communication.org. 2008. 21 March 2012. <http://www.knowledge-communication.org/pdf/bresciani-eppler-risks-visualization-wpaper-08.pdf>
• Engelhardt, Yuri. “Graphics with a Cause – Neurath, Rosling, and the Universal Principles of Visual Representations”. On Information Design. 2012, forthcoming.
• Kerpedjiev, Stephan, Giuseppe Carenini, Nancy Green, Johanna Moore and Steven Roth. Saying it in Graphics: from intentions to visualizations. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis ‘98). Research Triangle Park, NC: 1998.
• Michels, Wil and Patrick van Thiel. Corporate design management. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 2006.
• Neurath, Otto. Empiricism and Sociology. Eds. Marie Neurath and Robert Cohen. Dordrecht-Holland/Boston-USA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973.
• Spears, Nancy, John C. Mowen and Goutam Chakraborty. “Symbolic role of animals in print advertising”. Journal of business research Volume 37. Issue 2 (1996).
• Storey, John. Cultural theory and popular culture. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2006.

Locative media describes the way in which place is tagged by virtual methods (that is, when people check in on Foursquare), or how an individual or object is traced through its progression through space and time (such as the open data project Open Paths that uses GPS tracking on your smartphone to trace your movement). For a quick review of the field and some preeminent examples, see this recent MoM post by Laura Burlacu and Daan Fliervoet. I find most interesting here the link between locative media and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, that is the role that objects, entities, and groups take on as actors in a network of heterogeneous parts. Such a network, which places as much emphasis on the consumer of a product as the producer, transporter, and overarching economic system in which this traction takes place, would then create an exciting space for the exploration of food systems.

The current global food system is in need of analysis and transformation. Our current food system model in our Western-dominated, capitalist society is built on cheap goods and services. As any addict knows, the first step is admitting you have a problem. The West has a problem: it relies too heavily on food originating in foreign lands and is not held accountable for the non-monetary cost of this cheap food production. These non-monetary costs include detrimental environmental effects on food transport, health deficiencies for individuals who do not eat enough healthy food (and cannot afford to), and lack of personal responsibility and connection between consumers and food products.

Information design using its tools of data visualization and infographics has developed into a field that makes data easier to understand for the average person. From a media and cultural point of view, these techniques can be used for a variety of uses to make the lives of citizens more productive and worthwhile. My research question begins with the idea that we should look at our existing infrastructure and determine which lasting components need fixing and in what ways our new media technologies can be used. In this way, I would like to imagine how food systems can be better explained and transformed through the use of data visualization. Luckily, many other researchers have already initiated projects in this field, and in this space I will briefly recount their work.

Arlene Birt is a scholar and visual storyteller who finds interesting ways to visualize sustainability. She refers to much of her work as “background communication,” which I think is a successful approach to calling often invisible, or hidden, relationships to the fore. Her work on education and sustainability has produced a website, Background Stories, which creates a discussion of the consumer’s role in food systems through the perspective of cultural, political, and environmental means. She explains her approach to sustainability through education:

“I am fascinated by the idea that we are endlessly tied to the world through the objects that we consume. Small, seemingly inconsequential objects populate our every-day, and yet the intricate lifestories of these objects are hidden from the eyes of their present consumer. I refer to my work as “visual storytelling” because I seek to visualize the narratives behind the seemingly ubiquitous everyday objects that we interact with as consumers; focusing on the larger influence that these interactions hold on the world. By bringing the attention of the viewer to the detailed, factual and sometimes even fantastical background narratives of objects and ideas, my intent is to inspire people to understand how their everyday choices impact global environment and society.”

A particularly interesting project by Birt is TraceProduct.info, an application that can be used in-store at the moment of sale where scanning a product presents information for the consumer on the product’s history and tracking. Along the lines of locative media and ANT, this application emphasizes the role the user plays in the grand scheme of the food production network, while not masking the background interactions by farmers and both large and small-scale food distributors.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a sort of precursor to this project, Birt developed an installation entitled “Visualizing Grocery Impacts” in which scanning a bar code on a product will then “project interactive and visual information on the product’s background impacts (including global, ecological, political, social and cultural impacts) onto a nearby wall.” Both these projects rely on the fundamentals of data visualization: interactive user design, data-driven information, and social awareness through a unified graphic representation (see Engelhardt).

On December 4, 2010, the Food+Tech Hackthon took place in New York City where hackers, developers, and food lovers converged with the goal of creating new ideas to use new media technologies and open data for the benefit of sustainable food systems. The wiki of the site contains a good amount of data sets, APIs, and tools for other developers to carry out lasting projects. The problem the teams were tackling could simply be seen as making a food system process or activity easier for the user. For instance, the NYC Community Garden Map is an application and directory of resources for community gardens, so interested persons could search for community gardens in their area as well as find other people to invest in the garden with them. Similarly, the CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) Tool works by gauging interest with nearby friends and neighbors in your community who would want to join a CSA. The final outcome of the CSA Tool involves a visualization of a heat map of neighbor interest, and designates separate colors for the different roles of the individual, organizer and purchaser.

I want to conclude with the example of a data visualization produced by the United States Department of Agriculture entitled “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.” Emphasizing the growing demand for local and regional-based food directly from farmers, the USDA has given numerous grants to these specific types of farmers and organized their use in an interactive tool. Using data from local and regional food systems, the interactive map shows where money is allocated in order to show these resources in their productive economic and community development. The intended effect is to clearly indicate local food systems that spur economic development, create local jobs, and maintain the environmental sustainability of open space and farmland.

Through these examples, I hope I have introduced ways in which information design can be used with consumer conscious-raising endeavors that shape how individuals position themselves in their economic, social, and political environments. While the field of data visualization in food systems may seem like a lofty goal, its end result may simply answer where your breakfast strawberry banana smoothie came from.

References:

• Burlacu, Laura and Daan Fliervoet. “When Objects Talk with Each Other – The New Turn in Locative Media.” Masters of Media. 20 March 2012.
• Engelhardt, Yuri (2012). “Graphics with a cause – Neurath, Rosling, and the universal principles of visual representations.”
• Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Tuters, Marc and Kazys Varnelis (2006). “Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things.” Leonardo, 39.4: 357-363.

All of this information is processed on two equally important levels. On the first level there is the receiver. This receiver can be anybody from a traveler passing by an advertisement on the street, to a reader of a book, to a doctor looking at test results. This level may bear the name of primary processing and occurs in the individual’s brain. The second level of information processing happens when at the receiver’s end, the information is turned into study material on a meta level, transforming it into data. Causally, this will be called secondary information processing or reprocessing. When a receiver takes ‘raw’ information from his/her surroundings and repurposes it, the information becomes data. It may be analyzed, adapted, recontextualized and/or molded into another shape. Reshaping contains displaying the data in another form, such as a visualization.

In an information infused world, the secondary processing is increasingly important. It is helping the receiver to make better sense of the world around him/her. Information reprocessed clearly doesn’t only make the information better understandable, it can also point out important aspects of that information. In that sense, reprocessing is a subjective practice. But (expert) vision on a topic allows for that information to be fully put to use. Gathering information is the first step of reprocessing, making sense of it comes next (primary processing), and morphing the data in any way is last. After that, information processing commences from the beginning.

Schematization of reprocessing

Why is it important to distinguish these two levels of information processing? Because as much as we are already dealing with both, it will only become more prominent in the future. Everywhere we look, there will be touch screens to be interacting with, video and imagery, produsers’ shared stories, a Semantic Web anticipating our next move; the world is calling for our attention 24/7. In an information saturated world, it is important to manage its reception on both the internal/external cognitive side and the side of reprocessing.

Data visualizations: grasping universal matter
All information mentioned above can be reprocessed and visualized. Lev Manovich, for instance, has shown that images can be transformed into metadata in his project Cultural Analytics. Computational methods have opened up a lot of possibilities in large scale data processing, modeling and visualizing. Especially data visualizations are becoming more and more important. As long as the world is producing information on this scale at this increasing rate, information management and data visualizations are essential. A prime need, even. Think of all the organizations and institutions that would fall apart in case of information shortage. My guess is that we wouldn’t be able to survive any lengths of time anymore.

But keeping our daily pursuits up isn’t by far the only job of data visualizations. In contrast, data visualizations are at their best when they strive to point out an issue or observe something interesting on a meta level. Visualizations are especially talented in showing people things that are important, remarkable, abstract, large scaled and difficult. Using open data and the latest media technology, visual representations can raise awareness. [2] Otto Neurath, Hans Rosling and Yuri Engelhardt all have in common that they believe in the power of visualizations to bring knowledge to the people, in which there is a universal visual language that everybody can learn to understand perfectly. Arguably, some principles are so universal that they can be understood without any training, such as the notion of ‘up is more’ in bar charts and line charts, a notion that has to do with gravity on our planet which makes things stack on top of each other (Engelhardt).

Global issue, global solution
As can be derived from the arguments above, the severity of the role of visualizations in understanding our world can hardly be overestimated. A global visualization in particular, like a world map, is quickly becoming an important visualization. Human perception of the world is improving. Connectivity now reaches across the globe within a second, and above that, humanity is facing major global issues, like the economic crisis, the energy crisis and the climate crisis. [3] In 1969, David Brower http://www.browercenter.org/node/179, founder of Friends of the Earth http://www.foei.org/, used the words ‘Think Globally, Act Logically’. Paul N. Edwards builds on this.

Thinking globally ” meant seeing the world as a knowable entity — a single, interconnected whole — but in a sense that lacked the secure stasis of maps, parlor globes, or pre-Darwinian cosmologies. Instead, it meant grasping the planet as a dynamic system: intricately interconnected, articulated, evolving, but ultimately fragile and vulnerable. Network, rather than hierarchy; complex, interlocking feedbacks, rather than central control; ecology, rather than resource: these are the watchwords of the new habit of mind that took Earth ’s image for its emblem. [4]

Edwards sees ‘climate science as a global knowledge infrastructure’. All across the globe, there are information gatherers and processors. It is a vast network of distributed data. The sources of that data should always be evaluated, Edwards says. But that’s a whole different debate. What is equally important, is how that data is displayed. Reprocessed. Formed into a data visualization. How do you grasp the complexity of the entire world into one visualization? Of course, a global visualization generally focuses on one specific view or topic. Below are two nice examples.

ChartsBin Interactive visualization on carbon dioxide emissions.

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FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) Google Earth layer: 4 degrees Celsius temperature rise.

This interactive map shows some of the possible impacts of a global temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius.
It underlines why the UK Government and other countries believe we must keep global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, because beyond that the impacts will be increasingly disruptive to our global prosperity and security. Source.

What is at stake here, is the well-being of the globe and humanity. Visualizations can make these issues graspable to everybody. When information is transformed into workable data and then to a visualization, this reprocessing is (in)directly contributing to a solution of the issue it is trying to bring to attention. Tiffany Holmes, for instance, supports the idea of combining art and technology to make people contemplate their energy consumption and thereby reduce it. [5] This will make the information even more appealing. Whatever the reprocessing may hold, fact of the (global) matter is that there are some serious world-wide issues to be taken care of, and data visualizations can help humanity to grasp it, model proposals, project impact and show us what we have to gain – and lose.

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References

[1] Kluver, Randy. ‘Globalization, Informatization, and Intercultural Communication’. American Journal of Communication, June 2000. Available online: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan002006.htm
[2] Engelhardt, Yuri. (In print, 2012) Graphics – Neurath, Rosling, and the Universal Principles of Visual Representations. On Information Design.
[3] A very interesting view on the three crises is by Jeremy Rifkin. He talks about an energy revolution, in which renewable energy is distributed like the internet. See the video on this here.
[4] Edwards, Paul N. A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. London: MIT Press, 2010.
[5] Holmes, Tiffany. ‘Eco-visualization: Combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption’. 2007. Updated version of paper originally published for C&C’07, June 13-15, 2007, Washington DC USA.