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)

“Basically, what I’m trying to say is that design can do wonders for visualization, yes, but so can analysis. Put the two together, and you’re going to gain a much better understanding of a dataset than if you were to have just one or the other. In my experience, designers are afraid of statistical methods and statisticians are oblivious to design. I say – put the two together. Learn both, and we’ll all be that much better at understanding the even bigger data to come.”

We made it, and I can say that the relationship with the Statistics Department of Bicocca University (thanks to Marco and Mario) works very well at the moment: none is afraid, and there are a lot of common interests. Let’s see!

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

On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce – in real-time – different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself.
The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of the city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.
CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams not as passive representation of realities but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narration, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.
CityMurmur is an on-going project that will be performed in several cities. The first one is Madrid thank to the possibility given by Visualizar’08 workshop.

The media space is composed by a RSS feeds pool containing 733 sources (so far).
Starting from an official list of Spanish media we classified all the sources and their RSS feed through denotative categories (topic, type and impact).
We tagged the RSS feeds also with connotative categories.
Once the RSS downloaded in depth scanning of the texts is performed in order to identify if a street, a place of interest or a district is mentionated.
When a news is related to a specific element of the city, a Murmur comes to life.

In order to reduce the possible divergence between the tags of the news item and their actual topic, a specific content analysis to gather more connotative (and possibly more accurate) tags, is performed.
The news tags and the content analisys results are mixed up to produce a list of georeferenciated semantic keyword.
Accordingly to the amount of Murmurs that each street, places of interest and districts have, the real topography of the city is deformed to produce a series of new maps from the more related to the real geographic space to the ones that ignore the geographic space and focus their interest on the semantic relationships: the result is a combination of an-exact overlapping pictures.

When the network of maps, diagrams and texts, are combined together the media geography appears and it is possible to understand its multifaceted reality.

The DensityDesign Lab approach, partially modified despite past editions, tries to foster this alliance in order to explore socio-economic phenomena that present both representational and visual problems. In fact they could be:
- complex;
- multidimensional;
- dynamic and evolutionary;
- not numerically measurable if not qualitatively;
- ambiguous and fuzzy;
- not dichotomous;
- of great impact on people and society.

The goal is to contribute to the construction of representation and visualization model respecting and preserving the inner structure of the analyzed phenomena, allowing users to know (see) them as a whole. This is not primarily a design issue, but an epistemological one; the aspect of visual representation and communication is only one part of a bigger topic. The broader aim is helping in build a cognitive process that integrates and combines different disciplines and skills.

The theme: poverty and social exclusion – conditions
Exclusion is a socio-economic status where people are placed on the margins of society, because of their economic, psychological, physical, cultural conditions.
To evaluate its forms and intensity requires models that consider a multitude of dimensions: the determination of poverty status cannot be reduced to simple and single indicator.
The study of poverty should be multidimensional being related to material deprivation, where the non-availability of certain goods, the lack of access to specific services establish a state of social discomfort.

Limits of representations
Traditional tools used for communicating the official data, about social issue, seem to be inconsistent with the characteristics of the phenomena:
- they produce only analytical views;
- the phenomena is over simplified and all the aspects that are blurred and ambiguous are neglected;
- an over-simplification often contains half truths;
- they do not express the approximations and uncertainties inherent to the data elaboration.

It is clear that, the more this kind of phenomena become subject of communication, the more the user should be aware of how the information is treated. We are not pretending everyone to be an expert in economics and statistics; we must build communication processes able to bring the user closer to what he wants to know.
The representation of socio-economic problem is not reducible to a problem or purely algorithmic technology, but not because of the quantity of data: complexity, multi-dimensionality and ambiguity are difficulty reduce into algorithmic computations.

This research area requires developing new visual grammars and communication tools that do not superimpose artistic or vaguely appealing elements over the representation of the phenomena, but should be able to build narratives deeply consistent with its inner structure. Visualization artifacts, diagram and maps, have to respect the robustness of scientific approach on phenomena while remaining consistent with the structure of cognitive and logic capability of the observer.

The first exercise conducted by DensityDesign students is seeking to intervene in this context: starting from 2006 official data (provided by the Istat) they build visualization about the poverty in Italy.