I contributed to the user interface design chapter in the recent Springer book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search – Theory, Practice, and Experience” (online version) edited by Giovanni Maria Sacco and Yannis Tzitzikas. Based on a definition of core principles and challenges, the chapter presents a taxonomy of navigation modes observed in existing applications. On that basis, design patterns for enabling these navigation modes in user interfaces as well as extensions and related approaches are discussed. The chapter closes with a section on personalizing faceted search.

The book itself covers a wide range of topics and current research questions related to Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search from an academic point of view.

You can find a pre-print version of the User Interface Design chapter here. Thanks also to my co–authors Sébastian Ferré, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren and Yi Zhang!

The symposium »Living with Information: Architecture and Visualization« (October 16 , 2009 at FH Potsdam) will juxtapose experiences and results from the MACE project with thoughts and design approaches from practitioners in the fields of design, architecture and technology. Guided by five central questions, we will explore future trends in information visualization, the relationship of visualization tools and creativity plus issues like information over- and underload.

I am really looking forward to the unique speaker combination we put together:

• Miguel Cardoso from bestiario,
• Paolo Ciuccarelli from Politecnico Milano /density design,
• Georgi Kobilarov from FU Berlin / dbpedia,
• Norbert Palz (CV + info) and
• Andrew Vande Moere from infosthetics.com!

In addition, Prof. Boris Müller and I will provide a rear-mirror view and outlook of our activities related to the MACE project… A wide spectrum, but hopefully all held together by the central issue of the workshop and the five questions we prepared for the speakers.

Hope to see you there – register soon – space is limited!

On a related note, the Potsdam–based W3C office opens on the day before, which should be quite interesting, too.

Together with my colleagues in Seattle and Umea, I modified the “change over time” visualization to tell a specific story: The formation of neuroscience as a field of its own right over the last decade. Originally scattered across related disciplines (such as medicine, molecular and cell biology or neurology), the neuroscientific journals start to define a niche of their own, reflected in the dense cluster emerging in 2005.

Download a larger version with full explanatory text here: png (1MB) pdf (4MB)

And here is some more in depth info:

First, almost 8000 scientific journals are clustered into groups, based on their citation patterns, and using the map equation (demo, paper). In short, for a network partitioned into groups, the map equation specifies the theoretical limit of how concisely we can describe a trajectory of a random walker on the network. Therefore, minimizing the map equation over all possible network partitions reveals regularities of information flow across directed and weighted networks or, in our case, the structure of how citations flow through science.

Second, using the Eigenfactor™ Score, the journals are assigned a measure of importance – much as Google’s PageRank algorithm ranks the importance of web pages. The Eigenfactor™ Score measures the percentage of time that researchers would spend with the respective journal, if they were to move through the network by randomly following citations in the journals.

This process is repeated in two-year chunks from 1999–2007, in order to capture changes in clustering and shifts in importance over the years. For this diagram, we picked only the clusters relevant to the formation of neuroscience.

In the visualization, each cluster occupies a vertical column block in the respective year’s column, further subdivided into a block for each journal. Each journal is connected with a horizontal band over the years. The height of each journal reflects the Eigenfactor Score. All journals in the cluster that corresponds to the field of neuroscience in year 2007 are highlighted to tell the story of the formation of this field of science. The coloring is based on the cluster assignments in the first year, 1999.

We use a subset of the citation data from Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports 1999–2007. The complete data aggregate, at the journal level, approximately 35,000,000 citations from almost 8000 journals over the past decade, but here we only display journals relevant to the formation of neuroscience.

X by Y visualizes all submissions to the prix ars electronica, from the early beginnings in 1987 up to 2009. The goal is to characterize the “ars world” in quantitative terms. A series of diagrams groups and juxtaposes the submissions by years, categories, prizes and countries. The graphics are composed of little dots (each representing a single submission) to provide a visual scale for the statistical statements and thematize the relation of the totality and the individual.

Their placement is computed with a Fibonacci series, imitating the arrangement of sunflower seeds – a very efficient and visually mesmerizing way of packing small elements into a large circle. Color distinguishes the submission categories, and a diamond shape marks submission that have been awarded a prize. The numbers in the center of the diagram elements are constructed by skipping points in the pattern – establishing a tight connection between the number and the individuals, but also demonstrating the duality of the two concepts.

The project is currently at display at the history lounge of ars electronica 09.

The project was done in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for media.art.research. Find all diagrams and some more info here: X by Y. Also, don’t miss the other works on the poster over at vis.mediaartresearch.at.

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

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

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

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

At the moment, I am digging through a couple of databases for an upcoming project. I did not really find a tool to quickly get an overview over a large set of categorical data. So I decided to roll my own and write a little nodebox script that walks over a CSV file, determines all the unique value attributes, counts how often they occur and plots the output as an area chart. The tool is good for getting a quick overview of categorical data, esp. missing values and the data diversity.

Download the dbcounter script including a sample data set of the Titanic passengers.
(needs nodebox – OS X only)

Sample pdf output

On a related note, you can also use the freshly released Parallel Sets application by Robert Kosara to determine relationships between the attributes. But that’s step 2 :)

On another related note, I cannot stress enough how awesome python is.

RANDOM WALK

WHAT DOES RANDOMNESS LOOK LIKE?

RANDOM WALK asks this question and presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness.
The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.

Update: lecture slides here. Thanks to Eric Rodenbeck and the other see#4 speakers for some last minute inspirations!

We recently launched a whole new version of the MACE portal. MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) is a pan-european initiative to interconnect and disseminate digital information about architecture. The idea is to connect and enrich various databases containing eLearning material for architectural contents and to connect and make them accessible in novel ways. The project is co-funded by the European commission. If you are more interested in the background of the project, you can also view our info page here. Personally, I am working half of my time on this project here at FH Potsdam.

So, let me give you a little overview of the portal:

MACE users can search for contents in our faceted search application (using elastic lists, of course :). Contents can be filtered by origin, language, media type, expert classification and competencies.

Alternatively, the portal offers a radial tree visualization of the classification taxonomy that can be used to traverse the hierarchy and find associated contents. It was built using flare, and I added some extra-nice splines and a breadcrumb branch.

Upon clicking the header of a search result, users get to the MACE detail page, a pretty rich widget patchwork for displaying and editing the available metadata. It displays not only basic information such as language, description, usage rights etc., but also allows to associate contents with locations, classification terms, competencies, personal tags, rating and comments. The same page can be reached from a content by using the MACE bookmarklet, allowing users to tag and remember or find related contents while browsing.

By analysing the text of resources, we automatically detect persons and architectural projects. We keep the focus to architecture by additionally querying dbpedia to make sure we actually found persons and buildings of relevance in the architectural world. Dbpedia also provides the metadata for these “real world objects” as well as some pretty well-picked flickr images via their flickrwrappr script. If you are not familiar yet with the dbpedia project, be sure to check it out, these guys are up to something.

Finally, users can find their own resources, or expect those of others, on each user’s own page. It displays not only all resources and tags associated with the user, but also a personalized, automatically generated “intro text” characterizing the person’s activity on MACE.

I am responsible for concept and styling of the portal UI, implemented all the flash parts like the elastic lists and the hierarchical visualizations and also a decent amount of the crazy Javascripts driving the site. For me, it was the first major HTML/CSS/JS project in a long time, and apart from the usual frustrations with large code bases in dynamic languages, I really enjoyed working on it, and especially learning jQuery, which is almost like a new programming language on its own. Very interesting.

We will try and improve on the portal over the next 6 months, and also get a bit more experimental now that all the technology is in place.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, drop us a line or start a thread on our getsatisfaction page! And if you are interested the project and the page, make sure to register to get most out of it!