presentation and article written for the class, advanced media aesthetics
Referred article, vizster, visualizing online social network, (pdf file link).

Summary

In my personal view-point, this paper concentrate on 2 important concept. The first one is visualization. If so, what is the information visualization? Though it’s hard to make clear definition of visualization, I believe the most important purpose of visualization is to understand something better. Undoubtedly, through the simplification and emphasis, the information visualization help for us to understand and comprehend the object better. Then, in this article, what is the object for understanding?
It is friendster. Friendster.com is a social network service. And this is another main subject in paper. Like cyworld in South Korea, friendster helps people to mange their relationship in internet. The description page of friendster.com will be more helpful.

• Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.
• Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests.

The essential concept is very simple. From now on, we’ll cover how it works in short.
You can make your account through the invitation or sign-up. And the first page shows your current profile. Your bookmarks, groups and your friends, too. But, If you signed up by yourself, you would have no friends at the first time. To make friends, you can use various ways. You can type your offline friends’ e-mail address or their name. Or you can browse the member list by their photos or videos. Also, you can search by keywords in the pre-determined criteria such as hometown, movie, music, books and so on.
That’s vizster. In this paper, the authors said vizster is a visualization system that end-users of social networking services, friendster, could use to facilitate discovery and increased awareness of their online community. And from now on I want to show how the authors accomplish their goal.

See slide # 13. This is the screenshot of vizster. In the left panel you can see the structure of the lines and icons which consists graph. Each icon, the authors call it node, represent the member of friendster. And the line, I mean edge, show the relationship between the members. In the right panel, you can see the individual information about the selected member. Each time you clicked the member icon, the right panel exchange, and will show you the member’s information. But I think the essential function of vizster is to show the connection between the members. Who is who’s friend? That’s the main concern.

First, you can find one member’s friends by the different saturation of member icon with mouse over action. Or, it’s possible to know the connection between two specific members. You can type the desired keyword to the text field by yourself. [See slide #16].
Or you can choose the keyword in the given criteria at the individual information panel on right side. Then, you can see the highlighted member icon which answers with your keyword. In this slide, you can see the members for the keyword, “student”.

See slide #17. Here is the different mode of visualization which is called x-ray mode, to visualize attribute values such as age, number of friends, gender, relation status, or time since last log-in. Now, you can see the gender difference at here. You can happen to know whether someone is male or female among Amanda’s friends. And the distribution of gender, too. Through the clustering close members, you can see the overview of the community structure. And with the dragging the community slider, you can change the state of clustering as you want.

After development of vizster, the authors test their work through the public installation and informal laboratory setting. The public installation was took in San Francisco with the group of party-goers and early-adopters of friendster. The test in lab, the participants were also friendster members. The authors found that both group enjoyed exploring social network and playing with this tool. And during the process of discovering the pattern of the community, the participants re-produce the story about the community. In this way, they tends to give a higher level of sophistication to the community analysis that is shown. As a result, the end-users of vizster use this tool to explore and play with their networks.

Topics

topic 1. the information and its visualization in the sociological context

higher level patterns of community

it can be regarded as the characteristics or meaning of information. Shannon and Wiener also said that the we can get information from the extracting pattern from something in his book, The Human use of Human beings: Cybernetics and Society. the interesting thing is the Wiener and Shannon derive their definition from the theory of the signal processing theory in the communication theory. Though, as I think, the partial concept of the visualization is obtained from the practical situation, the central concept is based on the other related studies, such as sociology, communication theory and cybernetics. For this reason, the coupling of the sociological data-set and the visualization of the technical regeneration is not a strange at all. In other words, the discovery is not a technology-based concept rather it occurs in our everyday life in spite of our unawareness. I want to insist that the discovery of the pattern as a process of producing information exists in the social perspective of our culture as well as in the individual context.

topic 2. virtual subjectivity

The most difficult part for reasoning about subjectivity is the sense of alienation between one’s representational subjectivity to public and his own sense of subjectivity or subject. One’s representational subjectivity in real world is out of subject’s control, or most of us believe that this proposition is true. On the contrary, in the virtual world or the online social networking service, the members assume that they can detach their own subjectivity which is generated during his online social behavior. That is to say, the created subjectivity in the online social networking service, i.e. the virtual world, is the different aspect of subject. Or it is possible to say that the virtual subjectivity has nothing to do with his real world subject. Like we need to have a set of several masks for our social behavior, the online subjectivity is the another set of our masks to live in the virtual society.

topic 3. information visualization and database

As a whole system, the platform for online social networking service imitates the real world. During this imitation, the complex system of real world is simplified by the generalization. And this generalization needs judgment. Because, during generalization, you should judge which factor in given dataset is necessary or not. For there is no photo-realistic method to represent or imitate the snapshot of online social activity, to grap the flash moment of virtual world, or to log the whole data-transfer, we have to judge which part of human activity has to be converted to the data in server. With this judgment, the architect who design online social network service represents the dynamics of the real world. Then, as a framework which represents the human activity, the database is a result of the judgment and representation. This premise can be a start of the asethetic discourse on the database. Further, we can think about the connectivity between the database as a structure of selective data and the information visualization as a reflection of real wolrd.

variablization of aesthetic subject in the computer-based media art

Like a random function in Math class in any kind of high level program language, subject in the media art functions as an Math.random() method. Regardless of the numbers of parameter which is passed to the core algorithm or the main OOP model, there are no doubt that the subject, usually participants, in new media art works as a signal emitter. They produce many kinds of signals, and then the computer-based artwork find the desired pattern among the bunches of the signals made by the participants. During this process, the participant works as a function. With this point of view, the computer-based media art is the evolved form of the Turing machine by Alan Turing. Then the artwork itself becomes the continuum of the objects. that can be called as a environment. Or sometimes, we simply name it as an interface. Thought the state of the interface in these day is so primitive, there are no doubt that the artwork is the perceptible execution code. Even the simplest program code run by the simplest type of Turing machine, the purpose of the computer code is to variablize human behavior, or finally, the subject. Like a point of view in the functionalism, or those of the situationist, the most important role of the human subject is his function in his own situation.

- deus ex machina
- functionalism
- Descartes
- situationist

The focus of the InfoLab is on the theory and practice of information systems designed for the actual skills and limitations of human users. We examine the work and life flow of people and seek the points of contact where our systems can draw the information from that flow that will allow them to provide information designed for that time, that place, and that person. We use the context of a person’s life and activities to get them to the information they need.The focus on our work in Network Arts is on the strategic mining of the Web to draw down information built through the distributed knowledge engineering that is Web publishing. Focusing not just on the documents that make up the Web, but on the point of view that they exhibit, our systems are able to both illuminate and inform.

Northwestern Univ. Intelligent Information Laboratory

Network Dynamics: A cross-dimensional analysis of network models excerpt (ISEA 2004, Helsinki/Tallinnn)
Network Arts: Defining Emotional Interaction in Media Arts by David Ayman Shamma

networked_performance – a research blog about network-enabled performance

Exosomatic memory is defined as below

Information stored in durable form external to the body (Idea drawn from Goonatilake, 1991), Bates, Four fundamental forms of information, 2006

You can also refer other articles, see below

It can be claimed as “the recording of emeories outside the brain.” see Wikipedia

By Birger Hjørland, you can find other two important definition about data, and exosomatic memory. These explanations are the part of the Core concepts in Library and information science(LIS) by Birger Hjørland
And this man, Newby is really a helpful for further research. See the paper titled as “Cognitive Space and Information Space” and “Empirical Study of a 3D visualization for information retrieval Tasks.”

iSIC: Information MusiciSIC is short for information music. It is a unique research project sponsored by CITO and Sheridan Institute of technology which explores the use of musical rules as a way to convey information. iSIC is a monitoring system, sort of a baby sitter for big complex systems. The complex system could be a large network, a server farm or a nuclear facility. iSIC lets operators mind the activities of systems through precisely mapped sounds which play pleasantly in the background. To achieve this the sounds are expressed as a musical paradigm. Most people will think that iSIC sounds like background music however a trained operator will know differently. Someone trained to understand iSIC will be able to get the latest conditions just by paying momentary attention to the “music”. Even if they are not paying attention the operators will be immediately alerted to changes in the system by changes in the music.

As of March 2006 iSIC is being field tested with IT operators responsible for the server systems at Sheridan Institute of Technology. The developers of iSIC are looking for a second test environment to explore the research and commercial potential further. Email us if you are interested.

InfoVis 2006 Call for Participation

Deadline ; June 20, 2006 5:00pm PST

Information visualization is traditionally viewed as a tool for data exploration and hypothesis formation. Because of its roots in scientific reasoning, visualization work has, until recently, been limited to a role of analytical tool for sensemaking.

In recent years, however, both the mainstreaming of computer graphics and the democratization of data sources on the Internet have had important repercussions in the field of information visualization. With the ability to create visual representations of data on home computers, artists and designers have taken matters into their own hands and expanded the conceptual horizon of infovis as artistic practice.

In its first edition, the InfoVis Art Exhibit examines the merging of artistic intention and visualization technique. We are looking for artwork that reveals data patterns in aesthetic, innovative ways. The goal of the exhibit is to steer viewers towards greater introspection about what information is worth visualizing and why.

The InfoVis Art Exhibit will consider the following types of work;

* interactive CD/DVD-ROM work
* interactive web-based work
* printed artwork

The best way to characterize Sutnar is to say that he was a pioneer, for he did pave way for new thinking and creativity, boldly trying things that today’s generations consider quite natural. His versatile talent made him part of a whole group of modern European designers and architects who strove to bring quality in ordinary life.

The scope of his creative and organizational activities is astounding. Inspired by the Bauhaus school, he lent truly modern design to articles of eneryday use, publications, toys, architecture and exhibition installations, advanced porfessional schooling in graphics to the highest levels of the petiod and influenced in a major way the lifestyle of prewar Czechoslovakia’s burgeoning middle classes.

When following 1939 he remained in the U.S., he asumed a prominent posotion aming its Euro-American avant-garde. Thinking about the future brought him to formulate the essentials of information design by which he in advance helped shape today’s 21st century world, and laid the grounds of modern visual communication in marketing, advertising and even enviromental protection. Like his design, geometrically precise, optially intriguing and at the same time highly imaginative are also his large nudes which he painted in the 60′s and 70′s, calling them “joy-art”. The first-ever retrospective exhibition if Suntar’s oeuvre covering both his Czech and Americal periods shows that the vibrant and thought-provoking work of this artist of a global importance is yet to be fully recognized.

article from this website.

In designing website, decoration is totally useless. sometimes it hinder the communication between user and information. Information is not a object. it’s a kind of organ that breathe. sometimes he communicate with us, as monkeys in the zoo laugh at us and try to hold our hands. over-drived decorations are same as barbed-wire which is setted between you and living information.
I think so. that’s why I love site designed in this way.
check!