Witness the artifact of the process

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:56:55 +0000

Derek Mueller over at Earth Wide Moth posted an interesting meditation on Google's recent mapping of the famously lost city of Atlantis.

Google's spokesperson addressed interest in the image by clarifying the lines, taken for ruins, that mark the ocean floor. S/he said in an email: "What users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process...The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

Derek's post (found here) focuses on this very issue of method, of the discovery of the trace even if it is not the trace of a lost civilization. Instead, on the map, we are left with signs or remnants of the mapper. Derek says:

"The conspiracy doesn't interest me all that much. Instead, I'm struck by the impression: the stamp left by the "systematic" tracing, the residue of the surface-to-sea-floor method (a term others have smartly untangled it into meta-hodos or something like 'beyond ways', even 'ways beyond'; this etymological dig lingers with me). The deep blue grid of "bathymetric data" elicits questions: why don't we see these in the adjacent areas? What was it about this boat, this collection process, this translation from sound to image, that left behind the vivid trails?"

It reminds me of recent work done on mind mapping in the Computer Writing and Research Lab here at UT:

Sean McCarthy recently presented on this tool and the alternative methods it offers not only for essayistic composition but also course organization and tracing resources.

You can find examples from his presentation here.

Visual Search for Wikipedia

John Jones — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:32:09 +0000

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

A few thoughts about this tool jumped out at me immediately: first, it seems like an excellent way for students (and everyone else who uses Wikipedia) to find related topics for a search term. Additionally, it allows visual thinkers to search the Wikipedia knowledge-base without having to read a bunch of annoying text.

However, I'm not sure that the mind map metaphor is the best one for this task. The searches I have done never go beyond the second-level in the hierarchy, making me wonder what purpose the hierarchy serves. Even if the engine was able to add deeper levels of results, I wonder if a simple clustering structure would be better for the presentation. It is unlikely that the deeper levels would be very well ordered, and the clustering method wouldn’t imply the kind of regimented outline that is the basis of the mindmap. If someone could put this same functionality into an interface like Visual Thesaurus and have it search through a couple layers of pages, the tool would be much more handy.

viz. - Mindmap

Witness the artifact of the process

Visual Search for Wikipedia