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

Brought to you by Better Nouveau, it will feature a partnership between the NodeBox — Experimental Media Research Group and DensityDesign.

Inspired coders, designers but also viz-amateurs are welcome with their knowledge, skills and creativity for a full-immersion visualization experience.

All the details can be found here.
See you in Turin from December 12 to 17.

Next week (November 29-30th), the kick-off meeting of the EMAPS European project (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science) will take place. We will work together with Fundació Barcelona Media Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Technische Universität Dortmund, Digital Methods Initiative – University of Amsterdam, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po), The Young Foundation – UK for the next three years in observing trough the Internet two main socio-technical controversies climate change and life expectancy.  More precisely, the aim of EMAPS, in the domain of science-society interactions, is to get a better understanding of whether the web can provide a meaningful equipment to produce an enhanced interest of a wider public (i.e. scientists, journalists, activists, corporations or citizens…) in science and technology issues, not as receivers of information about end results of science, but as potential participants in science in the making.

Our role in this project is to conceive visualization tools able to depict the form of complex social phenomena assuming that understanding a phenomenon means understanding its form and understanding the form means, also, to see and to visualize its data and information patterns. The main effort is to reveal and dynamically describe connections between people, politics, information and scientific issues.

In the middle of these two kick-off meetings, on Monday the 28, I’ll be very pleased to talk about our work – and our vision/approach to visualization – at ENSCI Les Aterliers, where I’ll meet also some very good friends! The speech is scheduled in the evening, with the title “Macroscopes. Designing visual tools to help people understand and make sense of complex phenomena“. A title that I actually like very much!

We’re all very excited at DensityDesign for these new challenges: two great opportunities to improve our knowledge on the potential role of design in making the complexity of social phenomena visible, accessible and usable. It’s also a very positive sign, showing how very different disciplines are nowadays looking at visualization as a tool to improve their research/knowledge processes. Between infographics for the media-scape and visualization for Business Intelligence and fast analytics there is a huge territory to be explored, an extension of the scientific visualization domain where understanding is really the first goal: (economic) performances and the quest for attractive and glittering pictures only come after, if any. In this territory we believe designers have a fundamental role to play.

We’ll try to keep you updated about these new projects via our blog.

from ‘Burnt Norton from Four Quartets‘, by T. S. Eliot

Talking with the project coordinator (Cristina Perillo) we defined a series of generic questions: How much debate there is about Creative commons and organizations? How much Creative Common works are related each organization? How much Creative Common contents are produced by each organization?
To answer to this kind of questions is important to set up a robust method to collect the data and analyse it. The difficult part is finding a way to analyse the content of each Internet page and understand if is relevant for our analysis or not. This task, quite simple for an human, become very difficult for a computer, which requires a series of standardized instructions. Since we have no access to reliable semantic analysis software in Italian language, we decided to turn the questions to Google and analyse the results. This method can seem less accurate, and in some way it is, but it permits us to analyse in a robust process a large number of pages, minimizing the bias of the research method, and it also permits
Starting from the search engine Google, we have defined four different query, each one answer to a specific task.

Aggregating the results on they root domain we start collecting quantitative data, and joining them to each organization we obtain a network, useful to identify the role of each organization in the network. This process is automated using a processing script, ran each month. You can find the process description below.

The last part is the analysis of the impact on Wikipedia. Our idea is to follow month by month the pages created inside the project, the number of edits and the size of each edit.
Talking with the coordinator of this part of the project inside Lettera 27, we found a way to collect in an automated way all pages created or modified due the project. Starting from this list, using the history function of Wikipedia we collect data about all the edits on a page, and using a user list we can recognize which of them are performed by project participants. Also in this case we’ve used Processing to automate the process.
All results will be available on our Issuu page.

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.

User will be guided through a step by step decision making process and he will be able to evaluate variables according to their needs. These variables include mobility data (distance, transport, neighbourhood), generic school data (enrollment, class size, number of teachers), school performance data (school subjects score/proficiency, attendance).

As output of user choices, a set of schools will be displayed on a map and he will have the possibility to compare them.
Dust attempt to overcome the limit of current visualization tools used in data-exploration of complex, multidimensional and georeferenced phenomena (phenomena characterized by a large number of interconnected variables) by using an intuitive user interface and direct and simple charts visualization.

Thanks to these features Dust will shift from an information visualization design paradigm characterized as “by experts for experts” to one described as information visualization “for the people” having a real impact on their daily life.