All throughout human history technical breakthroughs have altered the topography of human thought. Or, rather, human thought has had a freer expression when it creates a more efficient vehicle for its own transmission. The 18th century, more than many, may remind us of our own time. That period was the culmination of what had become known as the "Republic of Letters," a shared domain of imagination that lasted from 1500 to 1800.
As Open Culture points out, by the late 18th century, new technology had culminated in national postal services and mass printing. This mechanically-based read/write web allowed for the proliferation of ideas across international borders in record time and subsequently led to revolutions, not unlike the Arab Spring and #occupy movements of today. (Though with more guns.) Stanford University has been conducting a project to map the data from the Republic and its efforts have led to some interesting discoveries.
The travel geeks at Thomson have created a data visualization you can dance to. They tracked the top-level dance genres over the past century, and expressed the data as an animated map that moves from parent genre to descendant, proliferating over time.
The mapmakers used data from the books Bass Culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and The All Music Guide to Electronica, as well as Wikipedia. They marked the birth of each genre in five year periods. As well researched as it might be, the exercise wasn't without controversy, however.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be the birthplace of the American geek. Within MIT, its Media Lab drills down to the heart of the next wave of technology from creating buildings with 3D printing to prosthetic limbs to gesture-based user interfaces. For instance, the MIT Media Lab was where the idea for the technology seen in the movie Minority Report originated.
The unofficial motto of the MIT Media Lab is "demo or die." It is akin to the classic academic model of "publish or perish," except that students and faculty at the Media Lab are encouraged to actually create the products they are thinking up, as opposed to pontificating upon them in research papers. See below to check out some of the amazing waves of technology that will be bursting out of the Media Lab in the future.
Wikipedia is one of the most popular and highly-trafficked websites in the world, with over 3.6 million content pages. While much of the discussion around Wikipedia involves those using the site for research, it's always worth noting - and praising - the tens of thousands of volunteers who actively contribute and edit the content. In fact, according to Wikipedia, there have been some 463 million edits to the site - roughly 19 edits per page.
Wikimedia's data analyst Erik Zachte has just unveiled a new visualization that shows exactly where in the world these edits are occurring on any given day for the various language editions of Wikipedia.
Kovas Boguta, the head of analytics at Weebly and a guest author on ReadWriteWeb, has created another powerful data visualization, this time of the "the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and across the Middle East."
The visualization drew from Twitter use by Egyptians and influential others around the #jan25 uprising. Those writing in Arabic only are represented in red, only in English are in blue and overlap by various shades of purple. Influence, in terms of follows, are represented by lines and those who influence each other are located in proximity.
LinkedIn, the career-minded social network, unveiled a new feature today that helps users to visualize and interact with their professional network. Called "InMaps", the feature provides an interactive visual representation of your professional network, helping you to see who you are connected to and how they are connected with each other.
Are you highly involved in a few specific sectors? Or do you move about professional circles like a nomad? InMaps lays it all out for you to see.
Joachim Van Herwegen, an intern at the online music company Last.fm, has plotted his company's music information against user gender and age data. These "Gender Plots" also incorporate music information from Last.fm, as well as user profile information.
What results is a freaky series of visual statements that are as noteworthy for their as if! properties as for the window they provide on music and culture. Even where you disagree with the implied conclusions, these plots serve as a place of departure for your own internal conversation on music.
If you've gotten your fill of the Forbidden City online, move ahead a little in conceived time and a few miles in virtual space and visit Beijing's Yuangmingyuan, or Old Summer Palace.
Digital Yuanmingyuan is a collaboration between the Summer Palace's staff and researchers at the adjacent Tsinghua university. Unlike the Forbidden City, the Palace is a ruin, having been destroyed during the Opium Wars. The project is an attempt to reconstruct it in a shareable space it never had in real life.
A group of hackademics took the Wikileaks activity data from the Afghanistan war and mapped it, creating a video visualization of the events. The 91,000 documents track events including friendly fire and civilian injuries and death over the course of the last six years.
According to Mike Dewar, a post-doc student at Columbia University's School of Engineering, the heatmap, which runs at ten days per second, was based on the "number of events logged in a small region of the map over a 1 month window."
We've written before about how the latest technology can give us access to the remotest past. Specifically, we've covered the use of lasers to understand and even model our buried history.
Now, with the Scottish Ten project, Historic Scotland, in conjunction with CyArk, is laser-mapping five Scottish sites and five international ones, all designated World Heritage sites and making them available online. The laser mapping produces 3-D renderings that are accurate down to within three millimeters.
