This is a map of Europe as you’ve never seen it. It shows how people in the 27 EU states perceive the impact of the internet and mobile phones on their lives – and then contrasts this with their actual penetration in each country. We wanted to explore new ways to visualize such complex data. So we worked with a statistics team, under Marco Fattore, to crunch data from a 2008 Eurobarometer survey of 27,000 people. The result is this contour map, which makes use of the isobars of traditional cartography. Each panel above refers to a specific question in the survey. The higher a country, the more its citizens say the technology matters. The cartogram shows the tech’s actual penetration. A high penetration of technology doesn’t mean people see a real benefit in using it, the way we see the world is changing as more data is available. We wanted to show a new way to look at geography as Europe’s landscape gets reshaped.

THE EUROBAROMETER SURVEY LAST SEPTEMBER ASKED 27,000 EUROPEANS THESE QUESTIONS: (Numbers relate to the panels on the main map):

1 Has the internet improved how you do your job?
2 Has using a mobile phone helped in your work?
3 Has the internet made you more informed about current issues?
4 Has using a mobile phone helped you to be more informed?
5 Has the internet improved your opportunity to share views/access culture?
6 Have mobile phones helped you to share ideas and content such as photos with others?
7 Has the internet improved how you pursue your hobbies?
8 Have mobile phones helped you better manage your leisure time?
9 Has the internet improved your relationships with family and friends?
10 Have mobile phones helped you keep in contact with family and friends?

“Penetration” is calculated from the percentages of households and businesses with broadband access; and the percentage of households with access to the internet via PC, digital TV and mobile device.

Credits

Paolo Ciuccarelli (Scientific Responsible)
Marco Fattore (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Statistics – data analysis)
Donato Ricci (creative direction Project Coordination)
Michele Mauri, Giorgio Caviglia (coding)
Luca Masud (art direction)
Lorenzo Fernandez, Mario Porpora (designer)

Both the organizing committee (who selected CityMurmur project in March) and the audience (composed by journalists, professionals, students and researchers) expressed their interest after our “poetic” presentation (as it was called), pointing the attention on the effective results we collected from the beginning of the project on November 2008 in relation with the reality of the actual/traditional media scape. Most of the questions, were about the perspective of CityMurmur in journalism world or as a tool for policy or security tasks: we were pleased to answer that the project is absolutely on-the-making and any interest in new developments (and funding, why not?) is appreciated.

The “french trip” represented of course the opportunity to meet lots of kind and interesting people like Prof. Khaldoun Zreik (University Paris 8 ) who is the president of the organizing committee of HyperUrbain, Paul Girard (research engineer and member of R&D Committee for SciencesPo Médialab) and Christophe Leclercq (CITU, Université Paris 1). We take here the opportunity to thank them once again.

Our next “murmur” is going to born on August, in New Orleans (US). We’re preparing the energies to implement CityMurmur for the “jazzy-city”: Dixieland, we’re coming… (and “Yes”, we know: stereotypes are hard to die. Tell the media! Not us!).

Till then, here you are the Paris slideshow, embedded in it two videos…don’t miss them

http://www.cartografareilpresente.org

http://www.cartografareilpresente.org/spip.php?page=cartes&lang=it

http://www.france-bologna.it
http://www.dds.unibo.it

SIMPOSIO “GEOPOLITICA E MIGRAZIONI”

Complesso di San Giovanni in Monte, Aula Prodi, Piazza San Giovanni in
Monte 2, Bologna. Sabato 30 maggio, ore 10

Saluti: Carla Giovannini (Preside della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia
dell’Università di Bologna), Alberto De Bernardi (Direttore del
Dipartimento di Discipline Storiche dell’Università di Bologna)

Interventi: Catherine de Wenden (Centre d’études et de Recherches
Internationales, CNRS/Sciences Po), Gigi Roggero (Università di Bologna),
Olivier Clochard (rete Migreurop), Caroline Intrand (associazione Médecins
du Monde)

Presiede: Carlo Galli (Presidente del Comitato Internazionale di Bologna
per la Cartografia e l’Analisi del Mondo Contemporaneo)

It has to be said that normally we don’t work with massive database neither with final users when we produce our visualizations – especially in the Density Design Master Course. Anyway, we have here something to think about. And probably also something to say. At least, what I miss often in this critiques is a deeper consideration in scope, context and target: something that makes the difference if we talk about design!

Since we strongly agree with Kurt Richardson that «there exists an infinitude of equally valid, non-overlapping, potentially contradictory descriptions» for any complex system. And there is «the need for synthesizing a wide variety of perspectives in an effort to better understand the problem at hand, and how we might collectively act to solve it» and we strongly agree with Paul Cilliers that when: «dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination», we asked our student to model the Jules, Jim and Catherine System form their point of view, using the designer visual attitude, to better understand it.

We know that Complex system and chaotic one are not the same thing, anyway here are the diagrams resulting from our experiments

References
Rinaldi Sergio, 1998. Laura and Petrarch: An intriguing case of cyclical love dynamics.

http://www.siam.org/journals/siap/58-4/30592.html.

http://epubs.siam.org/sam-bin/getfile/SIAP/articles/30592.pdf

Strogatz Steven, 1998. Love affairs and differential equations
http://tam.cornell.edu/SS love dEq.pdf

Ivars Peterson:
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek 9 7 98.html

Cilliers, Paul, 2005. Knowing Complex Systems.

Richardson, Kurt A, 2008. Managing Complex Organizations: Complexity Thinking and the Science and Art of Management.

Extracts from Italo Calvino’s “Collection of sand”, 1980

The simplest form of a map isn’t the one we consider the most natural today, that is the map which represents the surface of the Earth as seen by an extra-terrestrial eye. The early need of fixing places on a map has got references to the topic of “journey”: it’s like the reminder of a series of steps, the layout of a route. The simplest map is a linear image, which can only be drawn on a long paper scroll. Roman maps were in fact scrolls of parchment paper: today we can understand how they were designed thanks to a surviving medieval copy, the «Pautinger’s plate», which includes the imperial road system from Spain to Turkey.
The overall vision of the then known world looks horizontally flattened as a result of an anamorphic transformation. Since the map focused only on the land roads, the Mediterranean Sea was reduced to a thin horizontal wavy stripe between two wider areas (Europe and Africa), so much so that Provence and North Africa look very close to each other and so Palestine and Anatolia.
[...]
Halfway between cartography and landscape painting, a japanese paper scroll which dates back to 1700, is 19 meters long and represents the route from Tokyo to Kyoto: this is a very detailed landscape in which it’s possible to see where the road surpasses high grounds, goes through groves, borders villages, overcomes rivers crossing a little arched bridge, adapts its course according to the extremely variable land conformations. The outcome is a scenery which is always pleasant for the eyes, lacking in human figures although is full of signs of real life. (The starting point and the arrival, that is the two cities, are not in the map: their look would have certainly fought back with the harmony of the landscape). The japanese scroll invites us to identify ourselves with the invisible traveller, to cover that road bend after bend, to climb up and down the little bridges and the hills.
Taking a course from start to end, gives us a particular gratification, both in life and literature (the journey as a narrative structure) so we should ask ourselves why was the topic of “journey” so underestimated in visual arts where it appears only sporadically.
[...]
Understanding an image through time and space is essential in cartography. Time assumed as past story: I’m thinking of Aztec maps always full of visual representations of historical and narrative tales, but also of medieval maps [...]. And time as future: think for instance at the presence of possible obstacles scattered along the planned route [...].
Therefore a map, even if it’s static, requires a narrative idea behind itself, it is conceived for an itinerary, it’s an Odyssey.
[...] François Wahl once noticed how earth representation was a practice started only when men began to refer ordinary sky grid reference to Earth. Doing that, sky parameters (like polar axis and equatorial plane, meridians and parallels) became Earth parameters, positioned on the surface of our globe, that is the center of universe («the most fruitful error ever»).
[...] «We had chance to describe the Earth just because we have projected the sky over it». 

Calvino wrote this inspiring notes after a visit to the exhibition «Maps and figures of the Earth» held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris on 1980.
He had chance to see the biggest globe ever built, ordered by Louis XIV to Venetian friar Vincenzo Coronelli, which had been dismantled in boxes at Versailles for about two hundred years until then.
He describes it this way:

[...] But the greatest surprise of all was the globe, in shades of brown and ocher, with pictures engraved on its surface (like brutal practices of savage cannibals) and inscriptions coming from news brought by explorers and missionaries who filled the gaps where the shape of places was still uncertain.
To Coronelli, California was an island, so he commented in a caption: «Some fools are saying that California is a peninsula …» And in an another point: «Here it is said that there’s an island, but it is false and I do not put it ». As for the sources of the Nile, after having placed them in a precise area and later moved in order to a new witness, Coronelli ultimately wrote down a text near the river, which candidly concludes with these words: «I have found myself with a space to fill and there I wrote these words».
[...]
We must say that it is only with the progress of exploration that the undiscovered world gained the right to appear in a map. What was not seen before, simply didn’t exist. Paris exhibition highlights this aspect of knowledge in which each new acquisition opens new awareness of gaps [...].
The moral that emerges from the history of cartography is always a matter of reduction of human ambitions. If in the Roman map the pride to identify the entire world with the Empire itself was implicit, we see Europe becoming small in comparison to the rest of the world in the map drawn by Fra Mauro (1459), one of the first map of the world designed according to Marco Polo’s reports and to the experiences of Circumnavigation of Africa: in this map the reversal of the cardinal points accentuates the reversal of perspectives.
It’s as if the representation of the world on a limited area, would automatically set it as a microcosm, suggesting that there’s a larger world by which is contained. For this reason the map is often the border between two geographies, the one made of parts and the one made of the whole, the one of the entire earth and the one of the sky, which can be taken as astronomical firmament or kingdom of God. [...]
From all these aspects we can learn how much subjectivity is important in cartography, which usually is conceived as a purely objective task.
[...]

Regarding the reasons that lead us to design maps, Calvino wrote a clever observation that examines the relationship between cartography that looks at “elsewhere” and the one that focuses on familiar territory. To Calvino, there’s always a tight link between the two, as explained with this anecdote.

In the seventeenth century the French fleet expansion required a regular production of timber, but the forests of France were running out. Then Colbert (translator’s note: the French minister of finance from 1665 to 1683) felt the need for a comprehensive relief map of French forests, in order to have always under control the amount of available trees and to plan rationally refueling and transport of timber to shipyards. At that precise moment in France, just to support maritime expanding, geographical knowledge of the internal territory bacame the primary need.

A detail of the famous Cassini’s map of France. Here it is a part of Bourgogne.

As explained by Calvino, Colbert charged Gian Domenico Cassini with the design of this extremely detailed map which took him and his family (four different generations of Cassini’s) more than 60 years to complete. The final map was drawn to scale of 1 to 86.400 and was…

… shown in the exhibition in a reproduction that was spreading all over the walls and the floor. Each forest had been designed tree to tree, every church had its steeple, every village had been squared roof to roof, so one could have had the unbelievable impression of having every tree and every bell and all the roofs of the Kingdom of France under his/her eyes. [...]
Cassini’s map missed the human figures that Coronelli still felt the need to include in its globe; but it’s just the fact that these cards are deserted, uninhabited, that awaken in the desire to live them from within, to shrink ourselves to find a road into the thickness of signs, to cover it, to get lost in it.

I’ve found this gorgeous website by Didier Verlaque, who joined all the pieces of Cassini’s map (in high definition reproduction), rebuilding the entire France as seen with the eyes of the seventeenth century.
http://releves.hd.free.fr/cassini/
I’d like to thank him for the great work.
But if you are more experienced with flickr, this is a set of photos of the Cassini’s map with the same awesome high definition:
http://flickr.com/photos/derami/sets/72157594402072857/

Images and additional info for the post, was taken from:
http://www.cg78.fr/culturel/musees/dossier/dossier.asp?Id=21
http://www.groupe-bovis.com/article.php3?id_article=68
http://expositions.bnf.fr/globes/index.htm
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globes_de_Coronelli

I read Kevin Kelly article on The New York Times Magazine and I found the concept of Visual Literacy very interesting.

Even if our society is getting aware of the importance of visual language for our contemporary communication, visual language needs more research to get to the point of being totally accepted in artefacts where traditionally we use text. But maybe it is the same problem it was for text literacy that has required a long list of innovations and techniques that permits ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful and in order to make sense of it. (For instance, if you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. And more: quotation symbols, alphabetic index, page numbers and a lot more. They have been invented in the 13th century. As it took several hundred years for the consumer tools of text literacy to crystallize after the invention of printing, we now need “visual-literacy tools” for fully understand something that is completely made of image.

]]> http://www.densitydesign.org/2008/12/14/visual-literacy/feed/ 0 http://www.densitydesign.org/2008/11/25/project-progress-report-02-systemic-approach-and-casual-loop-model/ http://www.densitydesign.org/2008/11/25/project-progress-report-02-systemic-approach-and-casual-loop-model/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:40:39 +0000 Donato Ricci http://www.densitydesign.org/?p=472 ]]> A causal loop model has been developed in order to help understand the complex systemic structure of poverty in all its dimension. System diagramming is here a loose term used to describe the activity of conceptually representing and visualizing a system in its constitutive elements: the elements, the relationships and the system boundary distinguishing what does and does not belong to the set.
The assumption of this qualitative exercise is that poverty, and its dimensions, are the result of the dynamics between a wide variety of factors from macro-politic, to the personal behavioral patterns.
The key element of the visualization are the factors and the variables. They are the environment attributes and characteristics that have an influence level of poverty.

A Relevance issue was a criterion for deciding which factors belonged to the system. In this case, relevance was determined by a open discussion between the students and the board of the course.
The system has been visualized in a particular format: a causal loop model (or diagram).

In a causal loop model, the system’s elements (factors, variables) are represented by boxes, and the causal relationships between two variables are represented by arrows. The variable at the tail of the arrow has a causal effect on the variable at the point. In addition, a distinction can be made between positive and negative causal relationships. A positive causal relationship implies that both variables will change in the same direction: if variable, a (at the tail) increases, then also variable b (at the point) will increase (and if a decreases, then b decreases). A negative relationship, on the other hand, implies that variables change in oppositedirections (if a increases b will decrease and if a decreases b will increase).
The causalities discussed so far are linear causalities (from a to b). Circular causalities (e.g. from a to b and from b to a) in systems maps are called feedback loops. They are an important feature of causal loop models because they help to explain the dynamic behavior of the system.