Seeing as the piece by Marie-Laure Ryan is discussing virtual space I thought it would be worth posting a link to the music map site I mentioned before. One problem with visualising data from databases is that representing it in standard 2 or 3 dimensional space - whilst useful as it displays it in dimensions we can easily comprehend - limits the ability to represent complex relationships between data.
Adding interactivity can increase the representation beyond simple 'cartesian space' and this is something that happens with these dynamic 'topic-maps'*. The item at the centre is the current point of focus. The closer any other item is to the centre, the closer the relationship between the two. Clicking on any of the orbiting topics places it in focus and displays a new set of associations. The end result is a set of connections that would be very difficult to represent (meaningfully at least) in standard/static space... and it's fun to play with too.
Probably also worth looking at www.gnod.net/ for a bit more info and some alternative applications.
* From xml.com: "...an information structure that breaks out of the traditional hierarchical straightjacket that we have gotten used to squeezing our information into. A topic map usually contains several overlapping hierarchies which are rich with semantic cross-links..."
Tuesday, 13 February 2007
Music Map
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2 comments:
This kind of relative music database has been put into practice at Last.fm and Pandora, although the user interface is aural rather than visual, so you 'explore' it by listening.
Both are great projects if you fancy listening to a certain kind of music, but don't want to cue up the tracks manually, or even if you don't own the music yourself.
They pitch their services as a personalised radio station.
In other information-visualisation news,
The Digiplay games research bibliography has an interesting tag cloud based on games journals and papers.
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