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I successfully defended my dissertation research proposal yesterday. I was a bit nervous, as this is a pretty big milestone, but I’ve got a great committee backing me up. They asked a bunch of insightful questions and gave me some good advice on improving some things.

I’ll post a copy of my presentation here sometime soon. I just wanted to mark the milestone.

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I found this navigation sphere via Information Aesthetics. I like the interface a lot, but it’s not without its difficulties. It portrays a series of images in the shape of a sphere that are connected to each other with lines. Both the images and lines are clickable. Click on an image and it will play that particular TEDTalk. Click on a line and it rotates the sphere to focus the connected image.

The images and lines themselves are a bit overwhelming. It is difficult for me to garner any useful information about the particular talk simply from the image. I might be intrigued by the look of a particular person or image enough to click on it, but I go into it blind, not knowing if the content is going to be of interest. However, the clickable images and lines are not the only components of the interface.

The more important and useful part of the interface is an overlaid translucent panel. At the bottom of the panel is a menu for visual, info, nav, about, and “X” (to close). Visual is the default. It allows you to manipulate the interface–the radius of the sphere, whether you’re looking at the sphere from a vantage point inside it or outside, making the connecting line visible or invisible, and allowing for fullscreen mode. The Info panel is what I need when navigating the sphere. It contains the information about the TEDTalk in focus–the title, a short description, tags, and the URL. The Nav panel is even more interesting in that is provides a tagcloud to allow for browsing the TEDTalks. Clicking on a tag produces a list below the tagcloud of all videos tagged with it. About is the obligatory information panel about the interface itself–who created it (Bestiario), that the videos come from TEDtalks, and a one-sentence description of what it is. The only complaint I have is that it doesn’t include the time of the video in either the panel or the spherical interface.

I think it’s an effective way of integrating text, tags and graphical navigation interface. I think it’s intriguing because I just started on a project today that has me exploring visualizations that would facilitate intercultural understanding. For example, in situations where there is a humanitarian disaster and the NGOs, the military support personnel, and the indigenous communities must work together to provide aid, relief and assistance. Each comes to the disaster context with different goals, different ideas about how things should work, different perspectives on the geography, and different ways of approaching phenomena. What becomes salient for these diverse cultural groups when they view the same phenomenon? It’s more than simply a visualization of a common operating picture (COP). Culturally different people will look at the same picture, object, or phenomenon and derive very different meanings from it. How do I capture what they see, what is salient for them? That legitimizes their perspective and worldview regardless of whether it conforms to the dominant objectivist perspective? Moreover, how do I create a visualization that will lead to a common operational understanding, a step beyond the COP? Is this the fundamental problem with COPs? I think it’s very likely.

It’s an interesting problem. I know that what they see is dependent upon their intrapersonal schemas–the patterns of cognitive elements that are evoked upon continually encountering the world–which shape what qualities and dimensions of an entity or phenomenon achieve salience. In Heidegger’s words, what is ready-to-hand becomes present-to-hand. But there’s a difficulty with trying to craft a representation for such schemas and display them with machines. It’s an ontology problem. With a three-dimensional visualization, you need to define the x, y, and z axes. But the experience is emergent and defies strict categorization. The only way to understand the experience is phenomenologically, but the only way to represent it is categorically. But reducing things to categories results in decontextualization and loss of semantic information. How can the semantics be retained in the visualization and representation process?

This is my conceptual problem to grapple with over the next few days. I have to have a direction to go in by Thursday morning. So, I think the best course is to delineate some boundaries and parameters of what is possible versus what is desirable, to craft some scenarios to help contextualize the visualization requirements, and explore how I might make permeable the potential categorical boundaries that I might be forced to employ.

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