In a paper entitled "Visualizing Social Bookmarks", Joris Klerkx and Erik Duval describe how it's often hard in most social bookmarking tools to discover implicit structures between tags, users and bookmarks. This is mostly due to the flat nature of tags, and an intrinsic trait of folksonomy in opposition to traditional hierarchical structures.

In an effort to solve this problem, the authors designed a system that "attempts to visualize these structures, so that end users can explore the social bookmarks in a playful, efficient and flexible way." In this work, a cluster map visualization application is customized to enable users to explore social bookmarks in the del.icio.us system. The design of the application aims to automatically identify tag and community structures, and visualizes these structures in order to increase the users' awareness of them.

You can also read the paper (pdf) here.

SourceMap is a outstanding venture sponsored by different groups within the MIT. As they state on the site: "When you invite people to an event, buy the ingredients for a recipe, or design the parts of a product, your choices have a significant impact. Some things have vast supply chains that stretch across the world while others are completely regional. Understanding the reach of our sourcing is fundamental to improving economic, social and environmental conditions."

Sourcemap is a tool for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. The site is a social network where anyone can contribute to a shared understanding of the story behind products. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using their Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each 'Sourcemap' can be used to help market socially - and environmentally - conscious products and to buy carbon offsets. Supply chains published on the site can be embedded in external websites, printed onto product packaging or linked through QR codes readable by camera phones. As the site grows, suppliers will be able to contribute their products to the Sourcemap database, providing a geographic catalogue of materials and products around the world.

The images shown here are from a sourcemap of IKEA's Sultan Alsarp bed. You might also enjoy seeing Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles. I truly hope this represents a critical business shift towards transparency and environmental awareness.

The images shown here were generated by evaluating and interpreting the 1997 music video "Mo Money Mo Problems" from the first disc of the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death. The algorithm detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion from frame to frame, using the initial frame as their starting point. The output is rendered as a vector image, the curves represent the motion. The points represent the pixels detected in the edge, their size determined by the distance from their previous location, the further, the larger the circle. The color and location of the points are determined by the corresponding pixel in that frame. The bright colored track suits worn by Puff Daddy and Mase in the dark backgrounds make for good tracking and nice color combinations. The only imagery added manually is the background color.

You can check out some more renders in the beautiful Mo Money Mo Problems photoset on flickr.

On September 18th, 2009, New Scientist posted some striking images from the Eurographics Symposium, held in Berlin, which brought together researchers across the globe with new ideas on mapping a diversity of phenomena, from the dive profile of penguins to signature recognition systems.

The one that caught my attention was the visualization of vessel movements, by Niels Willems, Huub van de Wetering, and Jarke J. van Wijk. "The sea seems an open playground, but regulations hold, and furthermore, safety (collision prevention) and security (thread prevention) need to be ensured. Operators monitor the coast using a Maritime Safety and Security (MSS) system, which allows analysis of multiple heterogeneous data sources." elucidate the authors on the problem driving their research.

The goal of the project was to introduce a new visualization method to support operators of coastal surveillance systems and decision making analysts. Using AIS data, the authors mapped the continuous data ships feed to coastguards to show individual traces of each vessel, where darker traces signifiy slower speeds, and colour coding shows the density of traffic in different areas. As the authors explain: "Trajectories are convolved by moving a kernel with the speed of the vessel along the path. We compute the density with both a small and large kernel and show them simultaneously in the shading of a colored height field. The large kernel shows an overview of maritime highways and the small kernel reveals slow moving vessels, which typically occur in zones before the harbour where ships drop anchor."

The images shown here display millions of data points during one week of shipping movement, near Rotterdam, on the Netherlands coast. The first image shows the traffic landscape on a good weather day, in opposition to a more disordered layout when the weather conditions are worse - shown on the second image. You can also read the original paper (pdf).

Ride the Byte was developed to make the normally invisible structure of the internet transparent for the general public and allow people to see the path taken by data packages transmitted via the internet. This electronic representation also visualises the flow of information to selected websites in the form of a simulated journey across a virtual reality globe.

The journey begins at the actual site of the installation with a website being called up. This triggers the dispatch of data packages to the geographic destination of the selected website and the relevant server. The ever-changing route of the data packages is charted visually on the surface of the virtual reality globe.

OneDotZero is an international moving image festival, showcasing a variety of work from innovators across the globe. For this year's festival in London, September 9-13, Wieden+Kennedy UK, together with generative artist Karsten Schmidt, were responsible for all the identity and branding efforts. For this purpose, Schmidt authored a generative engine for producing a series of randomized visual systems, which were recorded for use in the trailer and festival posters. The results were astounding.

From the OneDotZero website: "The heart of onedotzero's festival ethos of 'convergence and collaboration' inspired W+K to take advantage of onedotzero's vast fan base and harnessing and bringing together constant, global live conversations from a diverse range of social networking to create the identity. Aggregated words and opinions are channelled via specially created software devised by computation designer Karsten Schmidt. Colourful strands behave organically, gravitating towards invisible paths that will ultimately make the onedotzero logo. A living, breathing identity driven by onedotzero's audience and online community as well as in person at the southbank. A huge projection on the national theatre, lets you interact with the visuals via handset, sms and online message."

You can see Schmidt's flickr set, documenting many of the sketches, prototypes and outputs for the project, or check two videos of the initiative on Vimeo (video 01, video 02).

This new version of Tag Graph for Facebook, by Forrest Oliphant, brings considering improvements in terms of layout and navigation. It's an interesting way of browsing your friends' pictures and knowing in a glimpse with whom you share more photos. Not entirely convinced of the need for the background image on rollover state, but overall it's moving in a good direction.

Today almost everybody has at least one digital representation in one of the numerous social communities, like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. We tend to create these profiles to express ourselves, find friendship, connections and gain reputation. The profile data is constantly altered, retouched and updated to create a comprehensive image which draws attention, the currency of the web.

The bachelor thesis IDENTITAT - The "Gestalt" of digital identity - by Jonas Loh and Steffen Fiedler aims at evaluating how a digital identity is generated, in order to determine certain parameters on which a comparable analysis of the digital identity is possible. More than one hundred thousand personal raw data sets were crawled from the web to fill these parameters with subject matters. After the analysis phase, the data was visually abstracted and interpreted to give the disembodied digital identity a unique and characteristic "Gestalt" in form of a generated sculpture.

Focusing on specific data for comparison, the digital identities of eight specific people were recorded and observed through a custom webcrawler. Their consumerist (amazon), communication behavior (twitter), interests (delicious) and listening habits (last.fm) were saved in a custom database. Furthermore this data was analysed in detail to determine four parameters that generated the form of the sculpture.

As Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Max Baucus is one of the most instrumental lawmakers in crafting the health care reform that President Barack Obama has promised. In his many years on the committee, Baucus has amassed a wealth of connections to the health care and insurance industries, often through his ties to former staffers turned lobbyists.

The five former Baucus staffers who now lobby for the health care or insurance interests represent twenty-seven different companies or associations. In some cases these lobbyists have the same clients. This map of connections expose how close the many organizations seeking influence on health care reform are to one of the most powerful players in Washington.

All data was taken from OpenSecrets.org.

It took a while for reMap to be featured here, but it was probably worth the wait, since it's an extremely suitable project to occupy the 700th entry on VisualComplexity.com. Created by my good friends at bestiario, reMap is a semantic browser of the Visual Complexity database, alowing you to search between different projects based on a series of descriptional tags; every time you change your search parameters, reMap presents you with a new set of visualizations in a stunning graphical interface.

The first time Santiago Ortiz told me about the project, back in May 2009, I became immediately excited with the prospect of visualizing this body or work in an alternative way. And when it was eventually published a few months later, it quickly became VC's self-discovery tool. This meta-visualization - a visualization of visualizations - is also highly appropriate for the popular conception of VisualComplexity as a map of maps.

Sha Hwang, from Stamen Design, has recently created a series of though-provoking visualizations on the NYC subway ridership over the last decades. Using a spreadsheet with the annual recorded entries at each station in the NYC subway system, Sha Hwang decided to plot them on an interactive map (using modest maps) applying two different methods: scaled dots (centered on each station) and lines (unifying the different stations). Even though there are some pertinent questions, in the original blog post, as to the danger of extrapolating traffic flow from individual station boarding, this initial experiment is notwithstanding very valuable, since it could help explain many urban and sociological changes in the city over time.

Image one shows ridership in 2006 using the lines method and showing the time slider on the lower right. The second image illustrates the ridership difference - highly noticeable in the mid-town area - between 1977 (left) and 2006 (right).

The latest traffic feature in Google Maps is simple and remarkably clever. This is how Google describes its uncluttered design solution: "Just zoom-in on the city you're interested in, and click the Traffic button in the upper-right corner of the map. As you zoom in closer to an area of interest, we'll color the arterial roads, in addition to the highways, to show current traffic conditions. Just as with the highways, the colors correspond to the speed of traffic (relative to the speed limit of the road): green is free sailing, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic."

But what's really impressive about the system is the extremely efficient use of crowdsourcing to generate the information. When used on phones with GPS, Google Maps crowdsources huge batches of data on how fast you're travelling on a particular street, thus measuring traffic for fellow drivers. They also seem naturally excited with the possibilities of this wide participatory initiative: "This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city - every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp - and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions."

Synesketch is an artistic software library (Java API) for creative visualization of textual emotions. Code is serving as a medium between words, emotions, and images; between poetry and painting. As the author states: "Synesketch is the Web's first free open-source textual emotion recognition and visualization engine - not just a closed academic research experiment - so that the whole community can benefit from it".

Synesketch is a result of a research that spreads out through diverse fields - from natural language processing techniques based on WordNet, across Ekman's research of emotions, to color psychology, visual design, data visualizations, and affective computing. Graphics were done in Processing and the name "Synesketch" is a portmanteau of "synesthesia" and "sketch" - where "sketch" does not only refer to drawings, but also to the Processing artworks usually referred to as "sketches".

The first image shows six algorithmically generated images as a response to six basic emotions, defined by Ekman - happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust (left to right, top to bottom). The second image shows a detailed view of "happiness". For further details see the project's gallery.

The Oslo Metro (Oslo T-bane) is the rapid transit system of Oslo, Norway. The network consists of six lines that all run through the city center, with a total length of 84.2 kilometres (52.3 mi). It has a daily ridership of 268,000 (2009) with 105 stations of which 16 are underground or indoors.

Shown here is a fairly recent (2006) redesign of the Oslo Metro map, by Truls Lange, revealing a fresh execution. You can see the previous version of the map, or take a better look (pdf) at the new one.

This is a collaborative project between Stefanie Posavec and Greg McInerny of Microsoft Research. We have seen Stefanie's work before on her beautiful Writing Without Words. Using a similar visual method, Stefanie has worked with Greg in a set of visualizations that map the insertions/deletions of text through the six editions of The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin.

Each diagram represents an edition of The Origin of Species, and is modelled on the literary organism structure used for On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Within the diagram, chapters are divided into subchapters as in Darwin's original text, and these subchapters are divided into paragraph 'leaves'. The small wedge-shaped 'leaflets' represent sentences. Each sentence is coloured according to whether the sentence will survive to the next edition (blue) or whether it will be deleted and not be within the next edition (orange).

The first image shows the outcome of the fourth edition, while the second image shows the first and last edition of The Origin of Species side-by-side.

ED-MEDIA - World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications is an international conference, organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). This annual conference serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the discussion and exchange of information on the research, development, and applications on all topics related to multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications/distance education.

In order to better understand many of the underlying patterns of ED-MEDIA, an interactive application was purposely build showcasing 3 different visualization tools: (1) Map of countries tied by ED-MEDIA publications; (2) Map of ED-MEDIA authors tied by citations; (3) Detailed data views - most cited papers and most prolific authors and countries.

The graph method is based on Moritz Stefaner's Relation Browser.

Space Syntax is an advanced spatial technology as well as a highly influential theory of architecture and town planning. It was originally developed by Professor Bill Hillier and his colleagues at University College London (UCL).

Through over twenty years of research-informed consulting, they have developed a powerful computer-based modelling technique that demonstrates the key role of spatial layout in shaping patterns of human behaviour. These patterns include movement on foot, on cycles and in vehicles; wayfinding and purchasing in retail environments; vulnerability and criminal activity in buildings and urban settings; co-presence and communications in the workplace.

Their technology is underpinned by spatial design principles that have influenced planning and design policy throughout the world. Their mission is to help create environments that are socially and economically sustainable.

It was during my days at TED Global in Oxford, in the end of July 2009, during a talk by Evan Grant, that I discovered Cymatics - the study of wave phenomena and the effect of sound (vibration) on matter. Cymatics is a fascinating area of study for anyone interested in Data Visualization, or in the pursuit for visual sound. Named by Swiss medical doctor Hans Jenny, Cymatics derives from the Greek "kuma" meaning "wave", to describe the periodic effects that sound and vibration has on matter. The apparatus is fairly simple, usually involving a Chladni Plate (a flat brass plate excited by a violin bow), the results however are spectacularly complex and visually stunning. There are many parallel interpretations to Cymatics, but my favorite relates to crop patterns.

This is an interactive visualization of Eurovision 2009 final results, created with the goal of making the analysis of votes easier. You can move your cursor over the array of circles, representing countries who gave votes or competed in EuroVision 2009 finals, in order to view its name and every vote that has been given to that country. The images shown here are from a static version of the piece, originally created in Processing and available on Flickr.

Commissioned by turbulence.org, Bonding Energy is an electrogeography and data visualization project inspired by ideas associated with micro-credit loans and distributed computing applications such as SETI@home.

It consists of a set of "Sunsmile" devices that measure solar energy from seven sites around New York State. Every ten minutes each Sunsmile device takes a reading from its solar panel and sends the data to the turbulence.org server. When a viewer visits Bonding Energy they are presented with a live visualization of the data collected from the seven devices.

Data from each device is represented by a wedge in an animated circle. The colors in the wedges change as the data from the previous seven days is played back; oranges represent low light levels, yellows medium, and blues indicate high ones. Highlighted bands indicate maximum and minimum data values, and a rotating line of text displays the date and time of the data being displayed in the center of the circle at each moment. Shapes overlaid on the animation represent changing data relationships between and within the Sunsmile devices.