For this week's tuesday, we had the «progress session 1» on our agenda which is one of four monthly meetings where we present our progress to the whole semester and, additionally, anyone who is interested, I spent the beginning of the week mainly for preparing and refining the contents and the layout for this important first session. The main focus was amongst others on situating the work and a first prototype. In my case, I situated my work as a tool for researchers. As a first prototype, I showed my progress in getting into d3.js and in this context, embedding the data set.
One important annotation of the feedback of this presentation was the question of the benefit of this installation when used as this prototyping tool for researchers. This statement helped me a lot to iteratively rethink the whole situating process in order to address the adequate audience. Two other important points were the literature review and the related work research. This should help us to extract the main aspects of the literature and which ones were the most important for us regarding our work, as well as find strengths and weaknesses in previous projects dealing with this topic. Questions resulting from that were «What does my project contribute to the field?», «Why does it contribute?», and «After analyzing the market, what can be parameters for my project?»
Literaturewise, main key stones were:
1
Edward R. Tufte — The Visual Display of Quantitive Information
This book was important for me since it introduced me to essential principles of visualization and how to design these visualizations in a most effective way. It was merely practically oriented. This provided a basic understanding of the visual parameters a good visualization needs in order to be understandable.
2
Jaques Bertin — Semiology of Graphics
Semiology of graphics provides insight into semiotical concepts of visualizations and thus, the underlying messages can be understood. This knowledge can be used to enhance the communication in a subtle way.
3
Sandra Rendgen — Information Graphics
Rendgens work is a visual encyclopedia of data visualizations which provides a framework to showcase the many examples of data narratives and data visualizations. It mainly served for researching related work.
4
Felice C. Frankel, Angela H. DePace — Visual Strategies
This work is a practical guideline on how to approach a good data visualization. Rather than focusing on practical examples as in Tufte's work, it focuses on a practical process guideline on how to structure and acheive a good process for a data visualization project. This book as also recommended by Benajmin Wiederkehr.
5
Robert Klanten — Visual Storytelling. Inspiring a new visual Language
Similar to the book mentioned before, this book provides practical aexamples of how to approach both an inspiring and aestethic visual language.
As an example of the related work listed in the thesis I am going to show a little excerpt of these reviews here. As stated in a previous post, I found the work by art+com particularly interesting; especially the project «À la recherche», which functions as an example of a time-based installation in a very experimental but efficient way. This location-based kinetic installation, reminiscent of an exploded disco ball, reflects the light in such a way that points of light scattered on the walls appear and from these, repeatedly, the words «RE TROUVE LE TEMPS PERDU» are visible. These words can be understood as «The lost time found» (LE TEMPS PERDU RETROUVE) or «Search the lost time» (RETROUVE LE TEMPS PERDU), depending on where they begin to read. The installation thus refers to the legendary past of the place Les Bains in Paris, where it is installed.
This work is a good example in terms of providing content, referring to a data set, or a matter of research and representing it in another perspective, which enables the viewer to explore things and new combinations. This aspect is referring to the term «Explorative Data Analysis» [chapter 3.4] in some aspects, and thus, transferring it to spatial installations in a very experimental and therefore inspiring way. The installation visualizes different words, which are shown in a fixed amount of time. While observing the installation, the viewer gets to know the whole story step by step. Through this time-based set-up and the way of dealing with this sequentiality, it imputes a storytelling aspect to the work. Additionally, it also contains the aspect of reflection in various ways. Firstly, the installation is reflecting on the matter and the history of the location itself, expressing the findings of this reflection onto the wall and secondly, using a metaphor for enhancing the expression of the message. This is a first approach to a kinetic and time-based showing of sequentiality and most likely the best role model I found so far for the spatial installation in terms of approaching and visualizing the topic and additionally, taking the viewer into account. What I have to be aware of, referring to the complexity of my data set, is the possibility of orientation within the content of the installation and exploring it manually, as well as to put the focus on the communication of the linguistic research topics, such as narrative patterns.
As a direct example of a spatial data visualization, I would like to mention the work of Natalie Miebach who «translates science data into sculpture, installation and musical scores.» For her project series «Changing Weathers,» for instance, she «began building low-tech data-collecting devices that extract weather data from specific environments. Living on Cape Cod at the time, she went to Herring Cove Beach for 18 months on a daily basis, rain or shine, to observe and record the relation between weather and environment. The data was then compared to historical and global trends in weather and finally translated into a series of sculptures.» Referring to my hypothesis, this project is a very good example how translating data into another visual sphere can create a new understanding of the data set. This leads to the possibility of gathering new kinds of information. Since she was also collecting data over a certain amount of time, it is also a good example of how the aspect of time defines the look of the object. In a linguistic context, such installations can visualize sounds of someone pronouncing a word or telling a story. In terms of relation to time, it could be possible to have the viewer assembling this piece in order to let him reenact the gathering of data and thus, lead to a better understanding.
For a more detailed related work review or any further questions get in contact with me after 23rd of March.
At the end of the week, I was assisting the specification Interaction Design which was the host for the «World nformation Architecture Day». This event, lasting two days and taking place at ZHdK offered several workshops and lectures ont he topic of Information Architecture. Since this is an essentail part of data visualization as the designer has to cluster and structure data, and thus provides a new information architecture, it was very interesting for me to attend this event. Speakers like Benjamin Wiederkehr who, of course, talked about information architecture in the context of data visualization gave very important insights into the field. Especially Karl Fast from Normative, Toronto, provided a lot of knowledge as he introduced the topic of epistemic interactions. This turned out to be a crucial third key stone for my thesis.
As a last point, we all also chose our mentoring teams for the upcoming months of our BA thesis. My team consists of Björn Franke and Clemens Winkler.
