STUDENT LIST AND MANY EYES PROJECTS
ICAM130/VIS149 winter 2008: Contemporary Computer Topics
Visual Arts Department
| UCSD
The syllabus for this class is online at www.manovich.net/
As the class progresses, the additional materials related to each week meeting will be added to the class web site.
instructor: Dr. Lev Manovich
office: Visual Arts Facility (VAF) 553
office hours: Wednesday 2-3pm or by appointment
email: manovich@ucsd.edu
Readings:
All readings for this class will be available online at no charge.
Topic: Visualizinng Culture
Class Description:
Can we create quantitative measures of cultural innovation? Can we have a
real-time detailed map of global cultural production and consumption? Can we
visualize flows of cultural ideas, images, and trends? Can we visually represent
how cultural and lifestyle preferences – whether for music, forms, designs, or
products – gradually change over time?
In this decade we see a growing body of projects which visualize cultural content,
cultural flows, and social networks. People who create such visualizations come
form many fields: design (for instance, Media Lab’s alumni Ben Fry), media
design (Imaginary Forces’s visualization of the paintings in MOMA collection
commissioned by MOMA for its lobby), media and software art (for instance,
George Legrady’s visualization of books’ flow in Seattle Public Library
commissioned by the library; Listening Post installation by Mark Hansen and Ben
Rubin), computer graphics, and computer and information science.
These visualizations share certain limitations, which we will try to overcome in our class.
They typically rely on existing meta-data, and do not look “inside the
data.” We will attempt to visualize sets of cultural data based on the descriptions of the content and form (which can be combined with existing metadata).
The descriptions can be generated either manually or by software via automatic analysis.
In order to generate the descriptions of formal properties of cultural objects, we need to first figure out what they are.
In the 1920s Bauhaus and other centers for modern art and design have developed analysis of formal resources
and grammars of visual and spatial compositions;
and, throughout the twentieth century, filmmakers, architects, and later academics working in
film theory / architecture theory have provided similar analysis for cinema and architecture.
However, since the adaptation of software in all creative fields in the 1990s, a multitude of new
visual, spatial, and material forms have emerged.
Their development was so fast that theory has often lagged behind.
And while it is possible to find descriptions of formal resources in some new areas if we look at professional publications (textbooks, catalogs of best works)
these publications are usually not consulted by cultural critics.
Consequently, before we can analyze and visualize patterns in many contemporary cultural areas, we need to develop theoretical understanding
of their new means of expression. This will be the second goal of our class: developing vocabularies of the visual/spatial dimensions in new cultural areas
(such as motion graphics).
Note that this theoretical task and the building practical visualizations go hand in hand.
We can test our hypothesis about relevant dimensions by visualizing their use in a particular data set -
which then can lead us in turn to look at the data set again and to think about other dimensions which may be more relevant.
In a similar fashion, we can overlay other data on our visualizations (social, technological, economic, historical)
and test which data is relevant.
Requirements:
1.Consistent class attendance.
Class attendance will be taken every class - at different times. You are allowed to miss one class meeting without an excuse. Missing any additional classes without proper excuse (doctor's
notice) will lower your final grade half a letter grade for each class missed. Chronic lateness counts as absence. Forgetting to sign the attendance sheet or leaving early counts as absence.
2. Reading the assigned materials before each class meeting. If any additional online resources are assigned, you should go though them them before the lecture as well.
3. Timely completion of the assignments.
4. Individual project(s) which needs to be completed on time - will be judged on:
(1) is it visually compelling?
(2) does it fit with the class goals, i.e. does it reveal something new about culture which is not already obvious or known (as opposed to just being a cool visualization)?
(3) is is technically competent?
5. Participation in a group project which will be judged using the same criteria as individual projects.
6. Active participation in the discussions and critiques.
grading:
1. The assignments: %30
2. Individual project(s): %30
3. Group project: %40
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SELECTED RESOURCES:
definitions and techniques:
Wikipedia "visualization" article
Wikipedia "folksonomy" article
modern visualization techniques and resources
Ben Fry: Visualizaing Data (2008 book).
Programming Collective Intelligence (2007 book).
visualizaing culture - theory:
books by Edward Tufte
Franco Moretti. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2007 (paperback edition).
relevant fields and subfields of computer science / information science:
knowledge discovery
data mining
concept mining
web mining
information visualization / knowledge visualization / visual analytics
Software tools for information visualization:
an easy way to collect data in a group - use Google doscs spreadsheet - also allows to define forms
web based:
Google docs charts
Many Eyes
swivel
Visualizing timelines
desktop - no programming required:
Excel graphs
Coghead
desktop - scripting or programming languages:
Google visualization API
Flex
Matlab
Processing
Prefuse
Google socialgraph
other software recommended as Alternative to Prefuse and Processing:
Piccolo - A Java toolkit for structured 2D graphics using a scenegraph abstraction.
The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) - A 3D graphics and visualization toolkit.
JUNG - A Java graph processing and visualization library.
The InfoVis Toolkit - A Java toolkit supporting a number of visualization techniques.
Improvise - An application for end-user authoring of interactive visualizations.
software for network analysis and vsiualization
list of visualization software
taxanomies:
Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! - Making sense of it all
folksonomy
open directory - largest directory of websites put together by human editors ( useful as a taxonomy)
data sources:
theinfo
data 360
DBpedia
world population
ethnicity and migration
UC census
m:metrics
Big Champaign online media measurement
blog about social media measurement
list of companies whcih measure social media
cinemetrics
Theory articles about artistic and cultural visualization:
Lev Manovich: Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime, 2002
articles by Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas (designers of History Flow)
Andrew Vande Moere: Form Follows Data
Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere: Towards a Model of Information Aesthetics in Information Visualization
Other Andrew Vande Moere's papers
Warren Sack: Aesthetics of Information Visualization
to appear in Context Providers, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna, and Margot Lovejoy, Editors (forthcoming)
other articles by Sack
Robert Kosara: Visualization Criticism – The Missing Link Between Information Visualization and Art
Zachary Pousman, John T. Stasko, and Michael Mateas: Casual Information Visualization: Depictions of Data in Everyday Life
Infoaesthetics - look at linked texts
Books on digital art which contain some discussions of visualization projects by artists:
Christiane Paul. Digital art.
Stephen Wilson. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology
Bruce Wands: Art of the Digital Age.
Mark Tribe, Reena Jana, Uta Grosenick, eds. New Media Art.
Joline Blais + Jon Ippolito At the Edge of Art.
Richard Colson: The Fundamentals of Digital Art.
Tricia Austin + Richard Doust: New Media Design
artcies about infovis in media:
Dreaming in Code: Jonathan Harris
Business Week article about Lisa Strausfeld
Business Week article about Martin Wattenberg
selected visualizations of cultural processes:
Capturing and visualizing one's "media life":
MyLifeBits
Reality Mining
Slife
LastGraph
visualizing social media:
projects by Stamen design
flickrvision
WikapediaVision
history flow
paper about history flow project by the authors
other projects by Martin Wattenberg
Golan Levin: dumpster
visualizing atttention:
tag clouds graph tool
Tagclouds and cultural changes (analysis of results obstained with tag cloud tool)
tracking popularity:
google.com/trends
google zeitgeist
technorati.com
automatic news generators:.
newspond.com
spotplex.com
blogrunner.com
general infoviz portals - some of the projects use cultural data / show cultural nteractions :
VisualComplexity
Infoaesthetics
Viz4All
Use of visualizations in public spaces:
IAC building in NYC / student projects done for the screen at IAC building
imaginary Forces - MOMA project
Mobiglobe
Legrady's visualization for Seattle Public Library / other visualization projects by Legrady
web analytics:
www.google.com/analytics/
Other relevant visualization work:
visualization of statistics on development:
Hans Rosling - TED Lecture / Gapminder software
social networks visualizations:
videomap
social networks projects @ visualcomplexity.com
knowledge networks visualizations:
projects at visualcomplexity.com
mapofscience.com / map of science still images
visualization meets mapping:
(IM)MOBILITY / BORDERS, LABOR, MIGRATION
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SCHEDULE:
January 23:
INDIVIDUAL PROJECT 1:
Using Many Eyes, create a visualization which shows your media and/or software / hadrware usage over a particular period of time.
Using more data will increase your grade for this assingment.
Shown in class:
Hans Rosling (TED Lecture) - Gapminder software
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January 30:
Read Andre Moere: Form Follows Data and Warren Sack: Aesthetics of Information Visualization
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February 6:
Read folksonomy article
Read Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg: Artistic Data Visualization: Beoynd Visual Analytics
To be shown and discussed in class:
The concepts of artistic form/system/style/genre | film history
Wollflin on Renaissance ve. Baroque
examples of artisic styles in modernity and today
style and avant-garde: Ballet Mécanique about | movie
because contemporary visual and design culture (web design, motion graphics, etc.) is often experimental in its intentions, history and theory of modern art and experimental film and animation may provide better tools for understanding it than, say, theory of narrative cinema | motion graphics influences
analysis of contemporary music genres: Music Genome Project | wikipedia article and references
computer analysis of moving images: Soft Cinema
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February 27:
Prepare to discuss: Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg: Artistic Data Visualization: Beoynd Visual Analytics
Prepare to discuss: Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations
each group should create a document on our Google group and put their work so far there
begin thinking about the final project presentation:
- statement: what? how? why? (context and importance)
- visual presentation (design) of the project + statement
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FINAL PRESENTATIONS:
Wednesday March 19 3 – 6 p.m.
1. Presentation of your team project:
- show your project's web site
- take us through what, why, and how
- each member of the team should speak
- optional but recommended: show us a few images of related previous projects and explain what is your innovation/contribution
2. Each person - create a visualization in ManyEyes using some data from http://www.cinemetrics.lv/
put your project in ICAM 130 topics hub.
Name your project: cinema_yourlastname.