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!

On July 6, 8 and 9 Map Fest takes place at Mediamatic. Map Fest brings together professionals, techies, amateur enthusiasts and artists, to explore, create, define and oppose maps.

We start with an evening on Mapping for Change with Wietske Maas, Christian Nold, Malkit Shoshan and Annelys de Vet.

It’s very good to see the increasing production of ‘subjective maps’: is cartography, after the digital era, seeking for new point of views, new dimensions to focus?

Read the article and navigate the map

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.

Here in Boston, we participated at the Art and Humanities Complex Networks satellite conference at the Northeastern University. We had the amazing opportunity to present the Map of the Future and to share with this remarkable audience the experience of creating a narrative approach for understanding complex systems. We got a lot of feedbacks and we discussed about the future of data and information visualization. It was a great day. We saw very interesting projects presented by other speakers, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, Michael Schober, Ward Shelley, David Crandall, Martin Warnke and Carmen Wedemeyer, Jane Prophet just to named some; we met Isabel Meirelles again after Siggraph09, we shared enthusiasm for visualization and humanities with Hyperstudio Executive Director Kurt Fendt, we finally met Noah Iliinsky in person after long time digital correspondence.

We want to thanks all the organizers in particular Maximilian Schich and all the people we had the pleasure to talk with.

Here the slides of the presentation.

Taken from “An Atlas of Radical Cartography”

http://web.media.mit.edu/~dietmar/MappingContext/

“We usually consider space as being structured by absolute units. A meter is considered to have a constant length regardless of its position in space. However, in our daily life we often use units that are relative in nature: we measure space in minutes, costs or memories.

Wegzeit is a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space. Asking someone in L.A. about the distance between two locations usually prompts a response in minutes. It seems paradoxical that people rely on subjective parameters for their spatial decisions in a city with a largely regular, cartesian layout. But especially here, where the influences of physical space are leveled by this regularity, the importance of subjective, relative spaces become visible more strongly.
The project consists of six dynamic virtual environments that propose models of how to visualize three-dimensional relative spaces. They deal with certain properties and effects caused by the nature of relative space such as the asymmetry of temporal distances.”

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

http://www.theafghanconflict.de/