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.

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

amanda parkes / dietmar offenhuber, Jan 2007

Inspired by the natural interaction of physical state change cycles and the simplicity and subtle beauty of
Hans Haacke’s 1963 Condensation Cube, Dewy presents a display surface of ’pixelized’ condensation, like a spatially controlled fogged window, one that can communicate back to you with words and patterns. Slow and subtle in behavior, Dewy utilizes a materiality and temporality reminiscent of many natural environmental processes, and attempts to challenge, or create an alternative, to the visual pollution of existing systems of public media display.

MIT media lab / sociable media group
dietmar offenhuber, judith donath

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.

external: visual complexity, MIT Technology Review, Social Media Visualization Project

new media studies #7, Reductions in Social Network Visualization

• 

  comment flow

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

7min38sec, DVD video

“Above and below do not exist at first, and other indications of direction do not work either. The picture itself is an agglomeration of details that are constantly being created and disappearing, becoming and ceasing to exist, assembling and breaking up.” (Marc Ries)
more information on www.stadtmusik.org

SemaSpace is a compact graph editor and browser for the construction and analysis of knowledge networks. The program was specially designed for the fast, interactive manipulation of very large networks. SemaSpace was first released in 2004 and actively developed until 2010 by Dietmar Offenhuber & Gerhard Dirmoser.

The first version of SemaSpace was developed out of the need for a fast and powerful browser for semantic networks that involve a lot of visual content. Semaspace, a joint project with Gerhard Dirmoser, resulted in an interactive network editor and browser that was based on the web3d technology virtools, which is unfortunately now obsolete. SemaSpace was used for early projects like the ‘landscape of thoughts’, a textual analysis of statements and attitudes towards the European Union, and the first version of Gerhard Dirmoser’s Ars Electronica Thesaurus.

– visit the original project homepage
the ‘thought landscape’ (virtools player required)
the ars electronica thesaurus

featured: visual complexity