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.

One of the project's primary investigators, Dan Edelstein. explains.

The "visual browsing tool" (see below) is particularly intriguing. It is information-rich, but easy to use. You can watch the connections grow over a 51 year period. You can filter by years or by correspondents. You can compare the correspondence flow between two writers or view the era in terms of the geographical flow of ideas. You can click on correspondence to read the digitized original at the website of the Electronic Enlightenment.

Click to access data visualization

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.

Thomson blogger Osman Khan introduced the map as an incentive for travelers, Thomson's clients.

"Music tourism (visiting a city or town to see a gig or festival) is on the rise. But why stop at gigs and festivals? Why not visit the birthplace of your favourite genre and follow the actual journey various music genres have taken as one style developed into another."

I believe his inspiration was simpler than that. I believe Khan & Co. simply like to boogie-oogie-oogie 'til they just can't boogie no more. Just a theory, of course.

Other sources: okayafrica

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.

There is a little orange robot called Combusto. It can show emotion and has a wide array of movement. Think Wall-E with fur. Combusto is powered with an Android smartphone that has a unique chipboard in it that helps determines Combusto's functions.

Right next to the robot lab, there is a team working on holographic 3D imaging. Another line from Star Wars comes to mind: "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope." One of the goals for the holographic imaging team would be to make it feasible to make those Star Wars-style holographs a reality.

Throughout the Media Lab, students, researchers and faculty are using the Microsoft Kinect for gesture-based moving and tracking. The Kinect API is one of the most innovative consumer technologies to hit the market in a long time and its affordability makes for perfect use in research settings.

Tangible Media

If you put the ideas of holographic images together with the notion of tangible media, you get the computer that Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report. The company that is trying to make that vision a reality is called Oblong, and it originated at the Media Lab.

Tangible media is the idea of being able to manipulate a user interface either through gesture or interacting with a physical object connected through the Internet. This can also be done through Kinect, although the department also has a series of infrared cameras that can track movement and intention with more precision. The cameras are used to localize an item (say, a person) in a 3D space.

Tangible media is described as where the input is also the output. Say I have a gesture-based camera watching my movements. If I am using building blocks in physical space, those same building blocks should move in the digital space as well.

Capacitive touch, which is perhaps the biggest breakthrough in the smartphone revolution, also has origins with projects in the media labs. Indirectly, the iPhone and touch-based devices have roots at MIT.

Robotic Opera, 3D Printing & More

It is hard to keep track of everything that is happening at the MIT Media Lab without being an insider. There are teams working on prosthetic limbs that reduce the impact of missing legs and let a person move around normally. There is a storytelling center looking at new ways to present digital media. There is a camera center that is working on how best to utilize the powerful cameras now attached to every person's hip via cellphone. There are teams working on creating different densities of material coming through a 3D printer that can make the building blocks of structures with concrete. The innovators behind Rock Band came from the MIT Media Lab. These days, the music group is working on robotic operas.

The MIT Media Lab is majority funded by sponsors or "members" that are companies working on specific functions. For instance, DirecTV helps fund some of the interactive television projects that are being worked on. The building is designed to be an open center of collaboration where everybody can see what the others are working on. The idea is to get designers and scientists together to create technology that will have an impact on the world.

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.

The visualization is interactive and using various keyboard shortcuts, you can navigate between different views and event markers. You can zoom into a particular area (with the + key), for example, or filter the edits by language (with the space bar).

There are three types of visualizations available with this new tool: an animation of edits, a bubble map, and a heat map - all highlighting the 400,000 some odd edits that occur in a given day.

The tool reveals some interesting trends, not surprisingly showing different language versions more active depending on the time-zones. It also demonstrates that most edits to the Chinese-language Wikipedia come from outside mainland China.

Zachte has written a blog post explaining how he created the visualization tool using HTML5 and JavaScript.

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.

Super-high resolution PDF here.

According to Boguta, the language choice - most of the bloggers speak both Arabic and English - is an important element. Some make the choice to connect with other Arabic-speakers, probably a function of the organizational use of the Web by people on the ground. The choice of English is, among other things, a choice to spread the circumstances, flight and day-to-day activities of the first group, to the wider world.

"For me, the point is that the activists are cooperating with the west, on their own terms and in a constructive way...(I)n fact that is a key element and what allows this much bigger exoskeleton to tightly interface to the core. This is in contrast to what happened in Iran 2009...where the connections between those in Iran and the rest of the world were very thin and easily severed."

Wael Ghonim is a good example of how the visualization works. Large circle, well connected, surrounded by a large group of Twitter-users whom he influences.

Interesting to notice is the scattered group on the far left, which are mostly U.S. government and corporations like Google. "And that's probably how everyone in the rest of the network would like this future to look."

Street photo via Al Jazeera | thanks to Josh Jones-Dilworth

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.

When you create your map, you'll see different sections of dots (each one a person) in different colors. The colors represent different groups, according to associations. The larger the dot, the more connected that person is with others in your network. In my network, for example, ReadWriteWeb editor Abraham Hyatt appears to be the glue between many of my ReadWriteWeb colleagues. In another section of the graph, a former journalism professor is the common denominator.

As Ali Imam, senior data scientist at LinkedIn, explains in the blog post, this sort of visualized data can be useful for making connections and filling in holes in your professional social graph:

You can use those insights to measure your own impact or influence, or create opportunities for someone else. So, you might see two distinct groups that you could introduce to become one. Or, you might leverage one person to connect them to someone else. See an area that doesn't look like it is representative of your professional world? Fix it by adding the necessary connections.

To access your own map, visit http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/ - though you need to have 50 connections and 75% of your profile complete to access the feature.

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.

Among further conclusions you might come to with the data is that Slayer trends toward the gentlemen and Lady Gaga toward the ladies. No surprise there. It might surprise those of you who are entering your sixth decade of life to realize that the only musician you like is someone named Ronnie Aldrich. And those in my age group (nuh-uh) consist of people with musical tastes so abjectly awful that I actually wept a little before I could pull myself together.

Among the most interesting of the plots is one that maps the words used in the About Me sections of the user profiles. Punk is surprisingly resilient. Grandmother appears at 40 and grandchildren after 50. Given that Last.fm is located in London, a substantial number of the self-describing words are in Spanish, French, German and other European languages.

If you're a Last.fm user, you can use the "Playground" Van Herwegen created to map your own choices and descriptors against your friends.

It's always great to see companies leveraging and making public their own unique data. It's even better when it's presented in as effective and attractive way as Last.fm's Gender Plots.

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.

"(T)he digital reconstruction will be further expanded, incorporating drawings, photographs, historical records and archaeological findings, along with information gathered overseas by scholars and researchers."

Although built in the early 15th century, the Old Summer Palace was used as a primary place of government during the Ching Dynasty, from the early 18th century to the mid-19th. The Ming Dynasty, who built the Forbidden City, used it as the seat of day-to-day government, but the Ching only used it for formal ceremonies.

Destroyed in 1860 during the Opium War, a time of foreign control over China, the ruins stand as a symbol of oppression. One can hardly avoid thinking of the reconstruction as a symbol of Chinese repossession of power.

Yuanmingyuan photo by Bridget Coila

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."

In addition to Dewar, the map was created by Drew Conway, a PhD student in Politics at NYU, John Myles White, a PhD candidate in Psychology at Princeton and Harlan Harris, a statistical programmer Kaplan Test Prep. The group wrote the code as part of the New York August bit.ly hackathon. The code the group wrote to make the heatmap animation is available at github.

This group's isn't the only data visualization to result from the Wikileaks release. Which ones have you seen that have affected you in a particular way, have illustrated a heretofore illusive reality of the war or otherwise helped you clarify an aspect of this conflict? Let us know in the comments.

Visualisation of Activity in Afghanistan using the Wikileaks data from Mike Dewar on Vimeo.

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.

Having finished mapping the 18th century New Lanark mills in Scotland, Rossyln Chapel and Mt. Rushmore in the U.S., the team has begun scanning the neolithic sites on Orkney off northernmost Scotland. The Orkney Islands are a neolithic site of extraordinary richness.

The Rushmore job gives one an idea of the scope. They used six Leica laser scanners and 11 digital SLR cameras. They downloaded dozens of gigabytes of data daily. To save the data from the job, the team's computer system had over ten terabytes of hard-drive space. That was for one job. They're doing ten. And Orkney is equally vast, comprising the tomb of Maeshowe, the settlement of Skara Brae and a host of stones, including Stenness, Barnhouse, the Watch Stone and the Ring of Brodgar.

Once the Orkney's are done, the remaining Scottish sites will be the Antonine Wall, Edinburgh's old and new towns and St Kilda. The remaining international sites include locations in Japan, India and China. The project, which started last year, will not finish up until 2013.

Fast forward a decade and the programming necessary becomes easier to do and the number of people who know how to do it have increased substantially. The costs involved in creating a virtual world have decreased at the same time that academic and scholarly institutions have become much more willing to invest in it.

Rome Reborn
Working with international partners, the Virtual Heritage Laboratory at the University of Virginia has created a series of "3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550)." They stared with Rome in 320 A.D., after which date few civic buildings were added to the city. Click through for a video tour of the city.

Ancient Spaces: Acropolis of Athens
Ancient Spaces is a "a student-built, 'massively multiplayer' world based on classical antiquity" at the University of British Columbia. Among their projects are a set of 3D video tours of areas in classical Athens' Acropolis, including the Parthenon and the Propylaea.

Prof. Antonio Serrato-Combe: Tenochtitlan
University of Utah's Serrato-Combe reconstructed the main public spaces of the Aztec city under Moctezumah. He produced a digital model of the "Great Temple" complex in that city on the eve of the Spanish invasion. Like all good historical digital modeling, the spaces are built on rigorous archaeological and architectural study. Prof. Serrato-Combe's work formed the basis of the British Museum's exhibition "Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler."

IBM and the Palace Museum: The Forbidden City
IBM and the Palace Museum, which oversees this Chinese national treasure, worked together to create a virtual walkable version of the Forbidden City, headquarters of Imperial China from about 1420 to 1912. The City, which requires you download a proprietary client to run the interaction, allows you to create an avatar, talk to other visitors and even practice archery.

In the same way that data visualization can be used to look at statistics and render them more immediate and meaningful, virtual or digital or 3D modeling, whether in graphics or video, can do the same thing for history. The present reality of the artifacts of history can exert a tyranny of their own. For instance, most people don't know that the majority of Greek and Roman statuary was painstakingly painted. Digital models can help elbow aside the dictatorship of the present for a flash of insight into the past.

Sharing these re-imaginings via Web services, from video sharing sites to downloadable models, is a radical distribution model we can only have dreamt of not long ago. In the past.

Column photo by Cliff

Probably the most impressive thing I saw, though, was a media project by a student named Zoe Fraade-Blanar. Current: A News Project is a prototype meme tracker using data visualization.

The underlying data of Current comes from Google Trends, in particular the Hot Searches section. So it is ultimately powered by Google search queries. That data is cross-referenced with the five largest newspapers in the United States, using Google News.

"...it is not the placement but the thickness and volume of each line that represents the fluctuating level of interest."

Creator Zoe Fraade-Blanar has a noble goal for the project. In an explanatory paper, she explains that the goal is to "spotlight missed opportunities in news coverage, and, potentially, recover news readership that has been lost to more sensational sources." Current is Fraade-Blanar's third attempt to use data visualization "to tackle the question of what topics news media should be covering."

Fraade-Blanar did a stint with the New York Times Analytics Group in the summer of 2009, helping to analyze incoming traffic behavior. She discovered then that it often wasn't 'hard news' like politics or economics which drew the most traffic, but 'soft news' such as celebrity gossip or entertainment news. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're well aware of this issue. Some of our best posts are ones that our writers sweat over for hours, yet probably won't hit the Digg frontpage because of the topic. Whereas a top 10 list about YouTube videos can draw hundreds of thousands of visitors!

"Each of these circles is a news item. So every time you see a circle inside this information stream, that's a successful news item." - Zoe in an On The Media interview.

While Current has a noble aim, curiously it's the exact same goal that motivates content farms like Demand Media and the newly Yahoo-acquired Associated Content. In the words of Fraade-Blanar's white paper: "Each highlighted meme represents untapped traffic that could be channeled to a specific news site if only an article existed on the topic."

As we've noted before on ReadWriteWeb, content farms aim to supply content to meet demand - usually perceived to be what people are searching for on Google. Demand Media, for example, has a sophisticated analytic engine that identifies topics that will be most attractive to Google.

So although Current aims to mediate between a writer's "need to drive traffic to [their] website and the need to cover important, albeit less sensational topics," in reality it would most likely be used to identify high traffic topics (the ones that will make money).

Regardless of how it might be deployed in the real world, Current is a beautiful tool that nicely illustrates trending stories on the Web. Although currently it is based on Google Trends, it may add other sources like Yahoo, Technorati, Twitter and Bing.

Congratulations to Zoe Fraade-Blanar for a smart and well-designed project! There is definite potential for Current to become a useful commercial product. Check it out for yourself on the project website.

The judges - Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb's co-editor; Stephen Few, a leading data visualization expert; and Jock Mackinlay, Tableau's director of visual analysis - found the entry to be not just a powerful tool, but also an indicator of how easy-to-use data visualization is changing the world.

Kirkpatrick sees the contest in a broader context:

"Judging this event, seeing data visualization projects from around the world, was a whole lot of fun. I believe that data is a key platform for the future, and stories drawn from data could become one of the next big forms of DIY publishing. Just like blogging changed the world by making text publishing easier than at any other point in history, then YouTube enabled almost anyone to become a video publisher, and then social networks made it simple to put all kinds of content online - so too will other types of content get brought to life by simple publishing tools that will change the world.

"It was an honor to get to judge what I'm sure will be just the first of many of these kinds of contests. Look out Internet, data visualization is leaving the confines of experts and becoming another tool that any of us can use to change the world."

Rina received more than $3,500 in prizes, including a free trip to Web 2.0 in San Francisco from May 3-6.

Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb produced in partnership with Tableau Software where we examined interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the Web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Once on the Web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out Tableau's gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how to do it yourself in this five minute video.

Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog or website or anywhere online. This is the last week to enter Tableau's User Generated Graph Contest. Winner will receive a free trip to Web 2.0 and $500. Sign up before March 26.

Play With the Data

The top graph shows what kind of education will be required for the fastest-growing jobs. The bottom graph puts employment growth into a wider perspective. You can play with the data yourself by choosing different education levels or job types. You can also download the data and create your own visualizations.

Data source: Employment Projections Program, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo by Mark Puplava.

If you're anything like us, all you thought was "I can't wait to play with that." Well, your time is coming soon.

The interface has been tested for a number of applications, from virtual pottery-making at RISD, where you watch a user create a digital wire-frame pot as if using a spinning wheel, to the more intangible Tangible Media Group at MIT, where the g-stalt interface allows the user to "manipulate complex data sets with the hands".

"Starting today," reads the Oblong website, "g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles."

According to the article in the Times, this type of interface has already been in use in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and it quotes Underkoffler as saying that "in five years' time, when you buy a computer, you'll get this".

Several computer, PC and console makers are already getting ready to release gesture-based interfaces and consumers should start seeing them sometime within the next year, according to the Times.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.