semeiotica
evolutionary design ecology

Archive for visualization

Water Supply in Bangalore, 1998-2001

This graph represents the difference between demand and supply in Bangalore from the years 1988-2001.  Blue circles are per capita supply of water in Liters per day.
wattersupplybangalore8801

This graph represents the difference between demand and supply in Bangalore from the years 1988-2001. Blue circles are per capita supply of water in Liters per day.

Music notation as a method for visualizing social interaction in animals and humans

A comparison of interaction records in two group of hens. This figure illustrates the comparison feature of the music notation program showing the interaction records in two groups of hens interleaved in two-hour blocks.

Ivan Chase demonstrates a compelling use of musical notation for visualizing social interactions and (conceivably) networks using musical notation. Chase suggests that:

music notation graphs can be of particular help in a variety of fields interested in social interaction in humans, animals, and machines such as behavioural ecology, behavioural economics, social organization in animals, development of social networks in humans, human conversational analysis, and the coordination of actions in social robots.

Read the entire article: Frontiers in Zoology 2006, 3:18

Camera for the Invisible

Jay Silver is a researcher in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first met Jay when I arrived in Bangalore about ten months ago. While he was there, he made all kinds of cool things that allowed us to interact in interesting and fun ways with our environment! His recent work has been looking at how to make touch, sensation, and interaction with the world around us astonishing, especially for kids! I made this video while discussing his work with him in the Media Lab.


environmental camera from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Mapping Controversies

This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.

Sounds fun.

Addendum:  you can also view an explanatory video about Mapping Controversies, narrated by Bruno Latour

Organelle View 2: the cell cycle

Yeast Cell Cycle


Here is a new visualization of the cell cycle using a combination of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), Flash, and database-driven graphics. This new version from Chris Landau and Jamie Cope’s nformation design demonstrates the yeast cell cycle in 3D cycle stages along with educational information about the process.

Try zooming in and see changes in the nucleus as the cycle progresses.

Yeast Cell Nucleus During Metaphase


This project started as a collaboration at the University of Michigan with Anuj Kumar’s lab in the Life Sciences Institute and first led to the OrganelleView project.

Th Distribution of Intellectual Property Claims on the Human Genome

Here is a sketch I made showing the locations and extent of intellectual property claims on 22 chromosomes and the X and Y. These data are from 2005. The extent is larger today.

Click on the image to visit the full-size sketch.

Environmental Sensors for Consumers

Toys as Knowledge-Networks

I’m leading a lab this semester where two groups are developing new and interesting models for user interfaces and interactive experiences. One of the groups is looking at toys as a model for engaging intimately with science. The other day, we started thinking about toys as knowledge-networks and what that might mean for the design of interactive, tactile systems.

They’ve been using SCRATCH as a platform for development, but they’ve also been moving beyond. The team identified a few core values that they hoped to embody in the toys:

1. Astonishment
2. Play/ Tactile/ Haptic
3. Access
4. Information – Knowledge
5. Relatedness of things
6. Engagement – Belonging

Sounds like they’re off to a great start!

Finally, an intelligent viewfinder for genomic information

I ran across this today while searching for some mitochondrial gene information. It’s the MitoWheel (re:blogged via pimm). Gábor Zsurka, a mitochondrial geneticist, produced it in flash with actionscript.

click image to visit

When compared to, say, The National Center for Biotechnology Information’s mapviewer of human mitochondria, the difference and accessibility are unmistakable.

Mapping Colonization


Mostly these are notes to myself.

http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/1316.html

…. Because documents are simply points on the map, it is possible for
ThemeScape to show thousands of documents at once without overwhelming
the user. Zooming into the map reveals greater detail. For any region on
the map, a click of the mouse pops up a list of documents with related
content. Pointing to any document title displays a short text summary.
A mouse click links the user directly to the original document…..

http://www.pnl.gov/news/1995/nws95-07.htm

In Themescape, themes in the documents are layered and appear on the computer screen as a relief map of natural terrain. The mountains in Themescape indicate where themes are concentrated in the underlying documents; and their shapes — a broad butte or a high pinnacle — reflect how the thematic information is distributed and related across documents.

http://availabletechnologies.pnl.gov/technology.asp?id=129

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