TEDTalks Navigation Sphere
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.
Tags:conceptualization, cultural schemas, ontology, phenomenology, schemas, TEDTalks visualizationComments are off for this post
How Can Information Science Contribute to a Solution to the Climate Crisis?
I can’t answer that question definitively, but I have a few ideas. Not only will it be important to gather data and information from a variety of sources using a variety of systems, platforms and protocols, but it will be important that we address the communication of knowledge between the many cultures that exist on the planet. Developing information systems that allow us to translate cognitive and cultural schemas that are embedded in the information and knowledge of different cultures is one essential step. Enabling streams of continuous flow of information related to climate, geography, culture, humanitarian relief, food sourcing and distribution, infrastructure support, population displacement and relocation, epidemiological surveillance, and conflict emergence is another essential step. Creating a visualization mechanism that allows for understanding the continuous information flow by the collective bodies of decision makers responsible for managing the impacts of climate change is an essential third step. These steps are a bare outline of the boundaries of a potential solution. Any solution will be vastly more complicated and involve a great many information scientists and knowledge workers.
If you haven’t watched An Inconvenient Truth (and you should as it will shake you to your core), you may want to watch Al Gore’s acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize given in Oslo, Norway just a couple days ago:
The full text of the speech can be read at Al Gore’s site.
, culture, information, spatial visualizationComments are off for this post
TED Talks Jonathan Harris: The Web’s secret stories
Tags:informationJonathan Harris
, spatial visualizationComments are off for this post
Myths about the developing world
Information Science in action:
Tags:culture, human rights, information, statistics visualizationComments are off for this post
