MAS.962

Week 7

03.31.98

The Virtual Society: Identity, Interaction and Interface Design
Social Visualization: sensing the virtual crowd

Reading assignment:

• Donath, Judith. 1996. Visible Cities.
• Milgram, Stanley. 1976. Psychological maps of Paris. In The Individual in a Social World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• Tufte, Edward R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
• Tufte, Edward R. 1990. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Read the two papers (the Milgram reading is available in the bin on the desk near the entrance to the d+i area) and look through the Tufte books. There are a number of copies of them in the Lab; they are also in several MIT libraries and on reserve in Rotch. (No written review this week).

Design assignment:

Sketch a design for visualizing a large online group. This is just a preliminary sketch, meant to get you to think about the underlying issues in depth.

Some questions to think about are:

• What population are you showing? E.g. conference attendees? people who work together ? the visitors to a Web site? all of AOL? How many people are there? Do they know each other?
• What data are you visualizing? How is this information obtained?
• What does the visualization look like? How is the data mapped to the image?

Although we won't be doing an in-class critique of these sketches, I'd like you to have a chance to look at each other's work before class on March 31. Please send me the URL of your sketch by Sunday evening, March 29.

• Marina Umaschi Bers ... marinau@media.mit.edu
• Rick Borovoy ... borovoy@media.mit.edu
• Julie Burch ... jfb@media.mit.edu
• Ingeborg Endter ... inge@media.mit.edu
• Adam Holt ... holt@mit.edu
• Karrie Karahalios ... kkarahal@media.mit.edu
• Stefan Marti ... stefanm@media.mit.edu
• Kimiko Ryokai ... kimiko@media.mit.edu
• Fernanda Viegas ... fviegas@media.mit.edu
• Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson ... hannes@media.mit.edu