Sankeys are indeed a great way to visualize flows and/or distribution: they are able to give back a general idea of the relative quantities of these flows.

Back in 2008 we did a similar work for DRM, a publication about the state of design research in Italian universities and schools.

In this case it is only a matter of distribution, but in another project,  done for Politecnico di Milano, we developed a visualization that represented students flows during their academic career.
In this way it is possible to analyze how students behave. Do they change specialization from the B.A. courses to the M.A.? What kind of marks do they get? Do they find internships in their same area of specialization?

We are now working on a flexible Sankey generator tool, capable of visualizing both distributions and flows. The project is still ongoing, more news are coming soon!

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

Visual designers and data engineers have built interactive visualizations of out of all sorts of Mozilla data. Now we think it would be cool to create a visualization that attempts to demystify the collaborative process of making software, while celebrating our contributors. We’ve gotten some early input and design help from the talented team at Stamen Design, but to take this to the next level, we need your help.

If you’re a visual designer, data visualization guru, student or just interested in hacking on a cool project, join us to generate concepts and prototypes.

see the call

Adobe just rolled out a new feature over at Kuler. Pulse is a tool to visualize the colors used on Kuler related to country, season and tag. The color set can be scale in regard on granularity as well as the lighness of the colors.

You can further explore different shades of a color and their percentage in the color related to the other shades.

Beside the single visualization of a color set, the user has the possibility to compare to different color sets. Let’s say you want to compare what colors european people in spring ‘08 used to the colors american color-enthusiasts used in autumn ‘08 for the tag “hot”. The comparison could lead to an understanding of diverting perceptions depending on geographical and seasonal differences.

via Datavisualization

Knowledgecartography.org, ovrflw, Gaia Scagnetti and some members of the Density Design Lab, under the nom de plume Writing Academic English, are proud to annouce that Murmur is one of the selected projects for VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY – International Workshop-Seminar, Madrid, November 3-18, 2008.

Data Visualization is a transversal discipline which harnesses the immense power of visual communication in order to explain, in an understandable manner, the relationships of meaning, cause and dependency which can be found among the great abstract masses of information generated by scientific and social processes.
The Visualizar project, directed by José Luis de Vicente, is conceived as an open and participartory research project around theory, tools and estrategies of information visualization.
Medialab-Prado issues a call for all those interested in taking part in the VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY  project development workshop (from November 3 through 18), by collaborating in any of the teams that will develop the selected proposals. Deadline October 31st.

MURMUR aims to visualise the media attention on the urban space, in order to redraw a map of the city based on what is being said on each street.
The goal of this project is to understand and visualise how different media describe the urban space trough the attention that is paid on each street of the city. Official news, blog and personal website, thematic media will be monitored to generate maps that highlight the patterns of perception of the urban space. This mapping will lead to the creation of an atlas that will monitor in time the changing perception of the city areas. The atlas will produce different maps based on different themes, sources and time.

For the project we would appreciate the collaboration of people with valuable skills in:
- Management of GIS data
- PHP+SQL programming. Preferably with experience in parsing of rss data and google queries
- ActionScript 3 scripting
- Spanish new/old media consultant

If you are interested, feel free to ask any questions. See you soon!

C.Stem 2007 is a 3 days long
event focused on on generative systems as a tool as well as medium to draw new conceptual and creative paths.

The opening will be on November, the 29th, with an audio/video performance by Valerio Spoletini, creator of V-Scratch, and hardware/software tools for creating both music and visuals using turntable.
On November, the 30th, will be the exhibition, featuring:

• Tom De Smedt, Frederik De Bleser, Lucas Nijs: developers of NodeBox
• Michael Schmitz, genoTyp
• Ricard Marxer, Caligrapht
• Andreas Koller and Philipp Steinweber, Similar Diversity
• Alex Dragulescu, Spam Architecture
• Gleetchplug Design, OM, Gleetchlab
• Todo
• Pedro Mari, Streams

On Saturday, December the 1st, there will be the lectures about NodeBox, genoTyp and Evolving Logo and Caligrapht by the very voice of their authors.
See you there!

Flavio Curella