In Netzpioniere, an art-historical project contextualizing the practice of early net art, SemaSpace is used for exploring the social structure of the early “Thing” network, a central hub of the early net art scene. In the project, also the synchronoptic timeline conceptualized together with Mar Canet Sola is used.

You can visit the project and the visualizations

The second project, Facing Science conducted at the Humboldt University Berlin, explores the social structure of scientific collaborations across different disciplines and countries, a part of the WeltWissen exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau Berlin. Tim Otto Roth also made a nice documentation page for the application.

Link to the project

This project presents the results of an interdisciplinary investigation of the Prix Ars Electronica archive in the form of interactive and static visualizations of information. The archive is examined on three levels: total submissions since 1987 as a quantitative analysis, the jury process as a social network analysis, and the winning projects and their context in accordance with art scholarship.

The project is a collaboration between the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. and Ars Electronica. More on our visualization showcase website.

News: The project was featured on infosthetics.com, thanks Mahir!

more on the blog of see this sound.

Original Concept: Dietmar Offenhuber & Gerhard Dirmoser

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media Art Research

February 13-14, 2009 Art University / Audimax, Kollegiumgasse 2, 4010 Linz

This two-day expert meeting is dedicated to the discussion and comparison of new approaches to organize, analyze and visualize large bodies of archival information.  Archives like the ars electronica archive present themselves as massive collections of heterogeneous and, in some ways, conflicting data organized in many different formats. In order to make sense of this information, traditional database structures and query interfaces are not sufficient.
At the same time, it becomes more and more important to connect and contextualize information resources that already exist. For example, the past ten years have seen numerous initiatives for the documentation and preservation of media art, each contributing to the knowledge in the field. However, their content is usually fragmentary and employs a different form of knowledge organization. This workshop is also dedicated to current approaches that can help to bridge these islands of information. We will compare methods for the exploration,  contextualization and disambiguation of information through computational analysis, social approaches and interaction design. We will also discuss frameworks for knowledge architectures that are flexible enough to accommodate heterogeneous and often ambiguous information. We will bring together international experts who work in relevant areas, such as machine learning, visual analytics, knowledge technologies and interface design.

Friday, February 13th, 2009

10.30h Introduction
Dietmar Offenhuber  -Art University Linz, LBI for Media.Art.Research.

11.00 – 13.00h Panel: Knowledge Discovery
Strategies for knowledge discovery through content analysis, statistics or the social context Moderation: Dietmar Offenhuber (LBI)

11.00 – 11.30 “Visual Analytics – Intertwining Interactive
Visualization and Data Mining Methods”
Prof. Dr. Silvia Miksch Danube University Krems department of information and knowledge engineering

11.30 – 12.00
Prof. Dr. Lev Manovich
University of California, San Diego
Software Studies Initiative

12.00 – 12.30 “Visual tools for the socio-semantic web”
Moritz Stefaner
FH Potsdam
Interaction Design

12.30 – 13.00 Questions & Discussion
13.00 – 15.00h Lunch Break15.00 – 17.00h Panel: Structuring Knowledge
Strategies for structuring knowledge from heterogeneous sources
Moderation and Introduction: Sandor Herramhof (LBI)

15.15 – 15.45 “Smart Archives: The Brave New Semantic World”
Georg Güntner
Salzburg Research
Knowledge-based Information Systems

15.45 – 16.15 “mæve / Poetry on the Road”
Prof. Boris Müller
FH Potsdam,
Interaction Design

16.15 – 16.45 “Knowledge Visualization in Groups: Experimental
Evaluation and Archival Challenges”
Sabrina Bresciani
Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management

16.45 – 17.45 – Questions & Discussion
17.15h Break18.00h Keynote Lecture “Cultural Analytics”
Prof. Dr. Lev Manovich
University of California, San Diego
Software Studies Initiative
20.00h Dinner

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

10.30- 13.00h Panel:
Knowledge Interfaces
Interfaces and access methods for hybrid archives
Moderation: Evelyn Münster (LBI)

10.30 – 11.00
Evelyn Münster / Jaume Nualart
LBI f. Medien Kunst Forschung

11.00 – 11.30
Prof. Dr. Gerhard M. Buurman
Zurich University of the Arts
Interaction Design and Design theory

11.30 – 12.00 Break

12.00 – 12.30
Wolfgang Strauss
Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis
netzspannung.org

12.30 – 13.00 “Bestiario, comprehensible complexity”
Andez Ortiz & Miguel Cardoso
bestiario, Bacelona/Lisbon
bestiario.org

13.00- 14.00h Discussion 14h End of Workshop

Social networks are abstract organizational structures that help us understand the relationships among a group of interconnected individuals. Much recent research has focused on understanding the structure of these networks, identifying patterns such as bridges, structural holes, etc. and on developing visualizations for these often complex entities. Yet the network itself is a conceptual topology.   The key is the activity that flows along the network paths: the support offered, the information given, the gossip exchanged.
We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.
In the mySpace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure.  Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”.   By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

• The siggraph presentation in swf format
• an earlier related experiment can be found here

for the project, the free voodoo camera tracker from digilab / uni hannover has been used