We are glad to announce“Visual explorations”, two courses of three and four weeks aimed at students, visual communication professionals, journalists, and any others interested in learning about and experimenting with visual tools and methodologies to help different users understand and make sense of data and information.

The quantity and the complexity of data and digital information produced from science, media, the world of economics, and individual activity on the Web has grown exponentially. However, amid a situation of abundance and richness, the opposite is also true, and the ability to extract value and enable the construction of meaning appears to be poor. People need and have the desire to access, understand, and use this huge quantity of information in an effective way, and explicitly need skills concerning both the construction of a visual representation of complex data, as the direct contact with the data: its extraction, manipulation, organization and communication.

DATA VISUALIZATION IN THE TIME OF DIGITAL MEDIA

The first course of “Visual Explorations” has the aim of providing students the skills to approach the visualization process critically and consciously, from the study of visual models to the design of cross-media applications.

DIGITAL METHODS AND DATA VISUALIZATION

The second course has the aim of developing the skill of (re)building a story; digging into and inquiring information from digital sources, such as on-line social networks; and visualizing the results. The two courses are linked by a common thread, a common approach to visualization as a cognitive tool, involved in the active construction of knowledge, triggering the engagement, making comprehension easier, and supporting users’ decisions.

For more informations visit the website: visualexplorations.org

From the very beginning of the Fineo development, our partners at CRISP (Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario sui Servizi di pubblica utilità alla Persona) tested the tool with their own different data sets to explore the temporal evolution of the samples and to understand the differences between different categories. On one side, they provided us with valuable contributions, on the other they started to figure out a possible integration into a BI platform.

Today they’ve released one of the data sets they’ve used with Fineo, giving us the permission to redistribute it in order to make possible a comparison with other tool.
The data set have been developed inside the Labor Project, using administrative data to analyse how Regione Lombardia’s social politics impact on the labour market. It contains a sample of about 2,000 individuals and their evolution in 7 months in terms of employment contract, job qualification, field and required skill level. The data set also contains information about socio-demographic variables such as age, education, nationality.

You can try the online application with this dataset.

The used data set, in TSV format, is available at this link.

This data set is provided “as is” only for testing purposes, CRISP is owner of all copyrights.

Data are everywhere.
Many disciplines are addressing the issues of giving access and making sense to all these data.
What can and should (visual) design do?

“VisualEyes / The Role of Design in Data, Information and Knowledge Visualization”
Open Seminar

Thursday 20 May 2010 | 10.00 – 13.30
Politecnico di Milano | Campus Bovisa | Facoltà del Design | Aula CT63
[Event's page on Facebook ]

10:00
“Understanding through Visualization: a Design Challenge?”
Paolo Ciuccarelli | Politecnico di Milano | dCom | DensityDesign
[ http://www.densitydesign.org ]

10:30
“Social Data Visualization”
Andrew Vande Moere | Senior Lecturer at University of Sydney & KULeuve
[Information Aesthetics | http://www.infosthetics.com ]

11:15
“Bootstrapping: use visualization to create visualizations”
Moritz Stefaner | Well Formed Data
[ http://moritz.stefaner.eu/ ]

12:00
“Web visualizations tools and trends”
Daniele Galiffa | VISup
[ http://www.visup.it ]

12:45
Open discussion

For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands. In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.

Taken from “An Atlas of Radical Cartography”

http://www.dynamicmediainstitute.org/node/168

The listener (in fables or music) or the observer (in cinema and theater) plays a fundamental role in the narration process. The narrator evokes whereas the observer interprets through his imaginary. The more qualitative is the narrator evocation, the more the observer becomes co-author of the story.

In the visualization of complex networks, the designer should use a narrative mode of though, giving to the audience a good story more than a sound argument. As the movie director, the designer aim to choose the visualization that more preserves the complexity of the environment. As a result he takes a political stance: he directs actors (the elements of a system), he decides the light design (the choice of the elements to visualize), the set designs (the imagery to evoke), the different optical lens (the power of focusing) and most important, the critical point of view of the camera (intentionality).

We will present our research in the visualization of complex systems. The paper “Tell them anything but the truth: they will find their own. How we visualize the map of the future with respect to the audience of our story” focuses on the emerging need for a narrative approach for the understanding of complex networks. We consider narrations as tools with the paramount function of myths <to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience>.

We are proud to present it at the Arts | Humanities | Complex Networks — a Leonardo satellite symposium at NetSci 2010 taking place at BarabásiLab — Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University in Boston, MA, on Monday, May 10, 2010.

See you there!

Complexity is a journey to infinity, and beyond! (© 1995, Buzz Lightyear) therefore the story we decided to tell in Como begins from the universe, and goes through the stars and planets, down to Density-Earth, a great place where statistics become information aesthetics, visualizations reveal ‘big pictures’ and potatoes are in fact big problems to solve.
What?!
Seriously, it’s easier if you look at the presentation up here and read the story we’re glad to spread.

If you’d like to watch the official video recording of the evening (and you understand italian), play it below.
For the english-subtitled version, check it out in the next few days.

like making a movie building this perfomances took hundreds (mmm just some to be honest) smart collaborators:
Screenplay – Paolo ciuccarelli
Additional screenplay – Donato Ricci
Concept – Michele Graffieti
Drawings – Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora
Storyboard Artist – Michele Graffieti
Animation - Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora
Coordinator – Mario Porpora, Donato Ricci
Flashman – Mario Porpora
Title Designer - Michele Graffieti
Text editing - Eileen Bernardi, Lorenzo Fernandez
Catering – Giorgio Caviglia, Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora