A crescente massa de dados que as redes e sistemas informacionais vem produzindo é certamente uma das vias privilegiadas de "registro" e "inscrição" do que nosso tempo e nossa cultura vem fabricando em diversos domínios - social, político, estético, afetivo etc. Um dos problemas enfrentados por aqueles que pretendem tomar essa rica e volumosa massa de dados como "objeto" de apreciação, pesquisa, experimentação ou simples interesse é a dificuldade em visualizá-la de forma minimamente ordenada e diferenciada. Respondendo a isso, inúmeros esforços cartográficos vem se dando nesse domínio, contruindo cartografias informacionais, mapas de nossa cultura infoormacional. Cito alguns exemplos interessantes, retirados do ótimo sítio para os amantes de mapas e sistemas de visualização de dados - o information aesthetics.
" a collection of data visualization methods that reveal the specific characteristics of communications between Usenet newsgroups members. the visual analysis focuses on distinguishing "signatures of role", such as identifying so-called "answer people", individuals whose dominant behavior is to respond to questions posed by other users. for instance, the "authorlines" visualization represents the volume of contributions for a single author across a year. each vertical strip represents one week. each circle represents a thread in which the actor participated during this week. red circles represent threads initiated by the selected author, while blue circles indicate threads initiated by someone else that were replied to by the selected author. the diameter of a circle represents the number of messages posted by author to that thread during that week."
" a new interactive search visualization tool that enables users to compare the search results from web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines or RSS feeds sources. a "crystal" consists of the overlapping results from different search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Wisenut, ...). the "categorization" view represents the overlap by different icons whose shapes & colors encode all the different combinations possible. the "cluster" view display overlap by circular distance from the center. the "spiral" view places all the found items along an expanding spiral. as a unique feature, people can embed searchCrystal as a fully interactive widget on websites or blogs to share personalized crystals."
" a collection of data visualizations illustrating the monthly lists of the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages between September 2006 & January 2007. it is shown that almost 40 percent of a month’s top 100 pages are visited in all 5 months, whereas 25 percent are highly visited only in a single month.
in "category view", circular icons with colored sectors indicate which specific lists contain the same page, & their size indicates how many pages are contained in a specific combination of lists. in "cluster view", star–shaped icons at the periphery act like “magnets” that pull a page icon toward them based on the page’s list positions. in "spiral view", all pages are placed sequentially along an expanding spiral."
"an interesting research project which explores how one can make use of the real-time biological information of the human body. several wearers record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) (a simple indicator of emotional arousal) in conjunction with their geographical location. this is used to plot a map that highlights points of high & low arousal, & visualizes where people feel stressed or excited.
the Greenwich Emotion Map project attempts to invent new visualization strategies to represent this data in the context of neighborhoods & communities.
see also bio-responsive server & coca-cola world chill map & gps drawing."
