Prerequisites: Permission of instructor
Level:Graduate Units:12
Thursday 2-4 in E15-054
Course administrator: Lisa Lieberson (lisasue@media.mit.edu)
description
What does a virtual crowd look like? How can you see the rhythms in a mediated conversation? What style of portraiture emerges in the era of data-banks and affect sensors?
In this class we will study the cognitive and cultural basis for social visualization through readings drawn from sociology, psychology and interface design. Students will explore new approaches to mapping virtual spaces and depicting online crowds through a series of design sketches and a final project.
schedule
introduction
09.09 What is social visualization?
Introduction to the field of social visualization - what problems are we trying to solve, what work has been done in this area, what makes it different from other forms of data visualization?
conversations
Discussions - in chatrooms, newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. - are the foundation of the on-line social world. We will look at ways of visualizing these discussions, looking both at issues in creating representations of conversational archives and at the problem of designing visual interfaces for ongoing, synchronous discussions
09.16 The social data in conversations
A great deal of social information is exchanged in discussions. In the real world, cues are found in gestures, eye movement, tone of voice; in the virtual world, though the cues are more sparse they are not nonexistent. Looking at both spoken and electronic discussions we will address such questions as What is the social information that is exchanged in conversations - how is it produced? how is it sensed?
Assignment: Readings about conversational structure; newsgroup analysis and sketches. Please submit your assignment online by 5pm on Tuesday.
09.23 Fundamentals: Color, shape, and narrative
When representing social information, the look and feel of the image - the subtextual messages conveyed by the style of the picture - can be as important as the actual data. Understanding the cognitive basis of visual perception is key to making innovative yet readable images. And "visualizations" can be more than visual, including auditory and other senses.
Assignment: Readings and exercises about color, shape and form. Please submit your assignment online by 5pm on Tuesday.
09.30 Conversation project
Assignment: Conversation sketch and newsgroup design. Please submit your assignment online by 5pm on Tuesday.
.crowds
What is an on-line "crowd"? What information do we want to see about it? What information do we perceive in our experience of real-world crowds? Examine ways of visualizing patterns of presence, activity and affinity.
10.07 Real and virtual crowds
The computer connects you to millions of others, but the screen gives very little sense of their presence or activities. Visualizing the crowd goes beyond depicting presence; the interesting problem is to show the patterns of activity and affiliation that provides its social structure.
Assignment: Observing real crowds and sketching virtual one. Please submit your assignment online by 5pm on Tuesday.
.10.14 Dynamics and interaction
Social data is often complex and/or subjective. A single representation cannot fully describe the envisioned situation - techniques that allow the view to explore the data from multiple perspectives are required. Furthermore, social visualizations may be front ends for communication, blurring the line between visualization and interface.
Assignment: Virtual crowds made of individual agents. Please submit your assignment online by 5pm on Tuesday.
.people
Massive amounts of data now accumulate about each individual - medical records, credit cards, highway tolls, newsgroup postings, etc. What does the "digital individual" look like? We will look at this both from artistic (what constitutes a portrait in the 21st century) and practical (how can visualizations assist people in maintaining control over access to their personal data) viewpoints.
10.21 Observing portraits
The portrait depicts a culture as well as an individual and it tells far more about its subject than just what he or she looked like. We will examine the roles of the subject, artist and viewer in creating the portrait.
Assignment: Observing portraits. Please submit the URL of your designs online by 5 on Tuesday.
10.28 The digitized self
New media give rise to new portraits. Biosensors, interactivity, new social paradigms and novel publishing venues have all changed the way people are portrayed.
Assignment: Observing digital portraits. Please submit the URL of your designs online by 5 on Wednesday.
11.04 People project
Assignment: A digital portrait.Please submit the URL of your designs online by 5 on Wednesday.
Other topics and final projects
11.10 (Wednesday 3-5) Final project proposals
Please have your proposal online by Tuesday evening.
12.02 Augmenting people and spaces
12.09 Final projects
Please put your final projects and papers online.
readings
Ahlberg, C. and Shneiderman, B. (1994). Visual information seeking: Tight coupling of dynamic query filters with starfield displays. In Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI '94 Conference Proceedings, pages 313-317.
Albers, Joseph. 1975. The Interaction of Color (revised ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1974. Art and Visual Perception. Berkeley: The University of California Press, revised and expanded edition.
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1988. The Power of the Center. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Bederson, B. B., Hollan, J.D., Perlin, K., Meyer, J., Bacon, D., and Furnas, G. (1996). Pad++: A zoomable graphical sketchpad for exploring alternate interface physics. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, March 1996, vol.7, (no.1):3-31. (more here)
Bertin, Jacques. The Semiology of Graphics.
Bier, E. A., Stone, M. C., Pier, K., Buxton, W., and DeRose, T. (1993). Toolglass and magic lenses: The see-through interface. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 93 (Anaheim, CA, August 1-6, 1993), pages 73-80. (more here)
Borovoy, R., Martin, F., Vemuri, S. Resnick, M., Silverman, B. and Hancock, C. 1998. Meme tags and community mirrors: Moving from conferences to collaboration. In Proceedings of CSCW '98, Seattle, WA, Nov. 14-19.
Brave, Scott and Dahley, Andrew. inTouch: a medium for haptic interpersonal communication. Extended Abstracts of CHI'97: Conference on Human Factorsin Computing Systems. ACM Press, 1997. 363-364.
Brewster, S. A., Wright, P. C., and Edwards, A.D.N. An Evaluation of Earcons for Use in Auditory Human-Computer Interfaces. Proceedings of ACM CHI '93, April 1993, pp. 222-227.
Brilliant, R. 1991. Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Card, Stuart K., Robertson, George, and York, William, The WebBook and the Web Forager: An Information Workspace for the World-Wide Web. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'96), 1996, 111-117.
Dodge, M. 1999. Cyber Geography Research. An excellent set of links to many visualizations.
Donath, J. 1995. Visual Who. In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia `95 , Nov 5-9, San Franciso, CA.
Dourish, P. 1993. Culture and Control in a Media Space. In Proc. Third European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work ECSCW'93 (Milan, Italy). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Eick, Stephen G. and Graham J. Wills. Navigating Large Networks with Hierarchies. In Visualization '93 Conference Proceedings, pages 204-210, 25-29 October 1993. San Jose, California.
Eick, Stephen G. Engineering perceptually effective visualizations for abstract data. In Gregory M. Nielson, Heinrich Mueller, and Hans Hagen, editors, Scientific Visualization Overviews, Methodologies and Techniques. IEEE Computer Science Press, pages 191-210, February 1997.
Feiner, S. and Beshers, C. (1990). World within world: Metaphors for exploring n-dimensional virtual worlds. In Proceedings of UIST '90, pages 76-83.
Feiner, S., MacIntyre, B., Haupt, M., and
Solomon, E. Windows
on the world: 2D windows for 3D augmented reality. Proc. UIST '93 (ACM Symp. on User
Interface Software and Technology), Atlanta, GA, November 3-5, 1993, 145-155.
(problem printing)
Furnas, George and Bederson, Benjamin. Space-scale diagrams: understanding multiscale interfaces. In CHI '95. Conference proceedings on Human factors in computing systems, pages 234-241.
Hill, W.C., Hollan, J. D., Wroblewski, D. and McCandless, T. 1992. Edit wear and read wear. Proceedings of CHI `92. 3-9
Hochberg, Julian. Perception (2nd edition). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Honkela, Timo; Kaski, Samuel, Lagus, Krista, and Kohonen, Teuvo. 1997 WEBSOM-Self-Organizing Maps of Document Collections, Proceedings of WSOM'97, Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, June 4-6, 1997, pp. 310-315. [The WEBSOM site]
Ishii, H. and Ullmer, B., Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits, and Atoms. In Proceedings of CHI'97, ACM, March 1997, pp. 234-241.
Kautz, Henry; Selman, Bart and Shah, Mehul. The hidden web. AI Magazine, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 1997, pages 27 - 36. [The ReferralWeb site]
Milgram, Stanley. 1977. Psychological maps of Paris. In The Individual in a Social World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
ibid. The familiar stranger: an aspect of urban anonymity.
Minar, N. 1999. Visualing the crowd at a web site.
Munzner, T. and Burchard, P. (1995). Visualizing the structure of the world wide web in 3D hyperbolic space. In Proceedings of the VRML '95 Symposium (San Diego, CA, December 13-16, 1995), pages 33-38.
Rennison, E. (1994). Galaxy
of news: An approach to visualizing and understanding expansive news landscapes. In
Proceedings of UIST '94, pages 3-12.
(problem printing)
Robertson, G. G., Card, S. K., and
Mackinlay, J. D. (1993). Information
visualization using 3D interactive animation. Communications of the ACM, 36(4):57-71.
(problem viewing & printing)
Small, David. 1996. Navigating large bodies of text. IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3&4.
Smith, Marc. 1998.Netscan: measuring and mapping the social
structure of Usenet. In Communities in Cyberspace. London:
Routledge (in press).[The Netscan
site]
Tufte, Edward R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
-------. 1990. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
Wirth, Lewis. 1938. Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology. Reprinted and abridged in (LeGates, R. and Stout, F., eds.) The City Reader.
Wolfe, Jeremy M. 1996. Visual search. In H. Pashler (Ed.), Attention. London, UK: University College London Press.
Whyte, William H.. 1988. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday.