I, along with my team from Kitchen Budapest, will be facilitating a data visualization workshop at Transmediale in Berlin next week. We are focusing on Cotton Candy as a new visualization medium. See some of our work here and here and stop by if you are at the festival. More info here.

R. Justin Stewart and I are currently working on a collaborative study that takes its cues from architecture, sculpture and design. We will be presenting the work sometime in mid-May (more specifics later). For now, a photo from our 4th round of experiments last night.

See the project page.

[flv:http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/download.php?file=4472.flv http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/thumb.php?id=2954%26big=true 640 480]

I recently developed an application for interactive patent database visualization and navigation. It’s still in progress but I thought I’d post a couple screen shots. It’s the standard mass/spring ball/stick network visualzation, which isn’t terribly intuituve or efficient, but it’s a start. This interactive program is written in Processing and uses various online patent databases.

Currently it allows several interesting group selection operations including tag cloud generation, date, inventor and class-based organization.

I’ll post more pictures and an online demo soon.

MyMap was awarded “best in show” at the student design exhibition Monday evening. It was a great event and a wonderful opportunity for some true cross-disciplinary conversation.

It was also quite exciting to share the project with the larger public for the first time. Some viewers were skeptical that it was a custom program. Some assumed that it was hand drawn. I was also struck by how unexposed this kind of mapping remains. While I (and others) have been immersed in the field for a quite some time, and can easily see precedent for my work, many viewers did not have that same knowledge of the precedents. It was gratifying to be able to give them a glimpse of the field.

For more info on the project, take a look here.

(note: more info @ here)

I recently submitted “My Map (A Self-Portrait)” to the College of Design’s All Student Exhibition. You will find the exhibition in the Commons Area at Ralph Rapson Hall (a map). On display for your enjoyment is a massive 44″x44″ archival print of my email corresopondence between May, 1998 and Jan, 2007.

Please stop by before the 6:00pm reception on Monday to cast your vote for “Student’s Choice Award”.

Here’s the my statement:

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998.  Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past.  Of great interest to me is revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family.  This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one.  Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait.  My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining my email archive.  The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line.  My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships.  In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

Here’s a picture:

Click on the images above …

Since 1998, I’ve been keeping all of my personal emails. I delete spam and obvious junkmail, but I keep everything else. There is a lot to be found in these emails. On some level they represent a personal history. I’ve been working on a Processsing application to help me begin to visualize the archive. A custom IMAP client accesses my email archive and imports addresses, names and other information from my address book. Over the course of 8 years, individuals use many different email addresses. In order to visualize individual relationships effectively, I have to keep track of all of the addresses. Since 1998, I have sent and received email from approximately 22 addresses.

These initial sketches attempt to reveal the underlying social networks latent in this huge archive of personal mail. Other versions of the visualization reveal more temporal aspects of relationship formation and decline.

I’m thinking of this in terms of a self-portrait initially. This particular visualization strategy was influenced by CAIDA, SCHEMABALL, GNOM, etc. An interactive version will be up sometime soon.