Election shows data illiteracy is a problem for journalists Amy Gahran, USC Annenberg Knight Digital Media Center, 11/7/12 FYI: "In 2012, the Knight Foundation broaden the KDMC mission to include community foundations and other nonprofits who are seeking to engage and inform their communities on critical issues. The KDMC provides resources and training in variety of formats including self-directed, web-based learning modules, instructor-led virtual classes and workshops throughout the country. In addition the KDMC offers consulting services for organizations in strategies for engaging and informing communities in the digital age" -Knight Digital Media Center RELATED: Pew research roundup: Digital media and election 2012
Below is an interesting infographic from Lumin Consulting that explains the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Thanks to Cathy Davidson for sharing this on Facebook!
I am fascinated by interactive large displays in public places, "urban screens" and the convergence of architecture and technology, especially media facades, and am happy to share a video of a presentation of Thomas Schielke to a group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Thomas Schielke is a German architect known for his work in the area of architectural lighting and media facades. In the presentation, Thomas talks about how new technologies are influencing what he calls "urban branding", and also provides an overview of related history. If this is an area that interests you, take the time to view the video!
Below is a summary about the presentation taken from TheHavardGSD YouTube site:
"Brands strive worldwide for distinctive visual identities in the urban landscape. At night they rely on luminous messages ranging from conventionally illuminated signs and billboards up to dynamic luminous architecture for story telling. Therefore, media facades have turned into a fascinating medium to create an architectural image in the nocturnal city. Some brands use guerrilla lighting projections for temporary installations to subversively transform urban spaces. Other companies equip their flagship stores with large LED pixel screens for high-resolution images or they consider the building façade as an interface for more artistic solutions. Often video screens appear as decorated elements competing for attention with traditional commercial billboards. Here media facades have become an interesting alternative to establish a more sophisticated design language for merging the dynamic content with the building. Whereas some luminous facades appear as monumental monologues repeating a fixed animation daily, some installations even allow people to interact with the building to receive enlightening responses. Thereby, the consumer becomes part of the urban marketing strategy to shape a vivid and progressive brand identity. The lecture by the German architect Thomas Schielke (http://www.arclighting.de) gave an overview about media facades for urban brand communication and addressed questions like: Will the energy consumption of luminous facades go along with the desire to introduce sustainability? To which extent do neighbors accept obtrusive luminous content? Further, what kind of media facades will shape the future of urban branding with luminous tweets?"
"The overview of international projects covers various lighting methods and techniques from lighting designers as ag4, Arup Lighting, blinkenlights, LAb[au], Licht Kunst Licht, Mader Stublic Wiermann, Okayasu Izumi, magic monkey, Onur Sonmez , Qosmo, realities:united, Rogier van der Heide, StandardVision, Uwe Belzner and architecture like Asymptote Architecture, BIG, Frank Gehry, Kohn Pederson Fox, Jean Nouvel, Peter Cook, UN Studio, schneider + schuhmacher, Simone Giostra, WOHA architects1. Artists like Doug Aitken are included in the timeline as well. Brands like Coca- Cola, Nokia, American Eagle, Citroen, Bayer and ERCO or social campaigns for Occupy Wall Street with the Illuminator are presented as case studies."
For all of the knowledge junkies out there, here are a few things that might fuel your passion for interactive information exploration and consumption. Although the tools below were adopted by people in journalism/news related fields, I think that they have potential for use in education and other fields. I'm interested in learning more about how people from different disciplines currently use these tools, and I'd also like more to this list.
CALAIS: "We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais. Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application." CALAIS is published by Thomson Reuters MORE ABOUT CALAIS PR Video for CALAIS:
"Jer Thorp is a software artist, writer, and educator. He is a contributing editor for Wired UK. He is currently Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times."
DOCUMENTCLOUD "DocumentCloud runs every document you upload through OpenCalais, giving you access to extensive information about the people, places and organizations mentioned in each."
LINKED DATA -linkeddata.org "Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.""
Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide
"....Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together."At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up."-TED
I've been following Nathan Yau's FlowingData blog for several years. It is one of my favorites. His new book, Visualize This : The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics, will be out in July 2011, and is available for pre-order on-line on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Wiley.
I love Nathan's editor's comment about his latest chapter: "Thanks for yet another very enjoyable chapter. If I had known statistics would be like this, I would have actually taken classes"
Here is the plug for Visualize This, from the Wiley website:
"Data doesn't decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.
Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau
Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers
Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator
Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them
Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing."
Trevor van Gorp works at Affective Design. He presented at the iA Summit 2010, a conference sponsored and run by ASIS&T, the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
In this presentation, Trevor discusses concepts such as emotion, attention, and arousal, the differences between novice and experienced users, differences in goals, such as experiential, goal-directed, how stress affects arousal and performance, and other topics, accompanied by clear examples, of ways to incorporate "emotion and flow" principles into web and information design.
It should be noted that "emotion and flow" strategies have been consciously implemented in video games by designers/developers for a long time, and these concept most likely have value across various digital domains, such as multimedia journalism, interactive television, and interactive surface or large display applications.
Below are the references from the presentation, as posted on SlideShare:
References
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). Flow - the Psychology of Optimal Experience . New York: Harper Perennial.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). Flow – the Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial.
Desmet, Pieter, R. (2002). Designing Emotions . Pieter Desmet. Delft.
Russell, J.A. (1980). “A circumplex model of affect”. In Journal of Personality and Social
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Creativity, Fulfillment and Flow, TED talk. 2008
Fehrman, Kenneth R. and Cherie Fehrman. (2000). Color - The Secret Influence . New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.
King, Andrew B. “Chapter 2 – Flow in Web Design.” 2003. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/2/ accessed on January 21/2007.
Hoffman, D.L, Novak, T (1996), “Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments: conceptual foundations’”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 60 pp. 50-68.
Novak, T.P, Hoffman, D.L (1997), “Measuring the flow experience among Web users,” Interval Research Corporation.
Novak, T, Hoffman, D, Young, Y (1998), “Measuring the flow construct in online environments: a structural modeling approach”, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, working paper.
Novak, T. P., Hoffman, D. L., and Yung, Y. 2000. Measuring the Customer Experience in Online Environments: A Structural Modeling Approach. Marketing Science 19, 1 (Jan. 2000), 22-42
Rettie, R., (2001), An Exploration of Flow during Internet Use, Internet Research, 11(2), 103 – 113.
Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X. pp. 40-41.
van Gorp, Trevor, J. (2006). Emotion, Arousal, Attention and Flow: Chaining Emotional States to Improve Human-Computer Interaction. University of Calgary, Faculty of Environmental Design, Master’s Degree Project
Lamantia's article discusses the thoughts of Nicole Lazzaro, a games researcher and design consultant, who suggests that there are four kinds of fun, as outlined in the chart below: --XEO Design Inc.
(The references for Lamantia's article are worth taking a look.)
"Jeremy Yuille and Hugh Macdonald are interaction design researchers with ACID at RMIT University. They research the effects of social media on different industries, ranging from sport to finance."
The Future is Touchable "Jeroen van Geel is founder of Johnny Holland and a senior interaction designer. He works part-time for Fabrique Communication & Design and the other part for his own clients."
A big part of interactive multimedia is visualization, and with the latest tools, interesting things are happening!
Flare is a visualization tool for the web, and utilizes Adobe's Flex SDK, an ActionScript 3 Compiler, and Flex Builder. Basically, it is an ActionScript library, and the applications run in the Adobe Flash Player.
I especially like the description of the Crisis Fronts project:
"Crisis Fronts is the Degree Project studio and seminar run by Michael Chen and Jason Lee, with Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.
Crisis Fronts is an ongoing inquiry into contemporary global crises that suggest new demands and agendas for architecture, and the potential afforded by parametric and generative digital design tools to engage them."
The Cambridge Guide to Multimedia Learning, edited by Richard E. Mayer, the "father" of this fairly new discipline, is a great resource for people involved in instructional technology and application development.
According to Mayer, "the focus of this handbook is on how people learn from words and pictures in computer based environments. Multimedia environments include online instructional presentations, interactive lessons, e-courses, simulation games, virtual reality, and computer-supported in-class presentations."
As I revisited the various chapters in this handbook, I realized that people interested in topics such as information visualization, computer-supported collaborative systems, and data-driven decision making might find some value from this book.
What I'd like to see next from Dr. Mayer is a handbook that focuses on ways people learn, think, and communicate through interactive multimedia that is presented on screens of all sizes. This is important, given the explosion of large interactive whiteboards in classrooms, large-screen displays in the home, and mobile devices that now contain higher-resolution screens.
Here is yet another video of a touch table from Microsoft's Center for Information Work that I think has great potential for use in education settings and for "serious games".
Microsoft appears to be targeting business, retail, and entertainment for new "surface computing" applications. I'd like to see Microsoft focus some of their efforts with this technology on education, as I think this technology would support "engaged learning". It might also inspire young people to consider future careers in technology. Given that we have a high school dropout-rate of about 30% in the US, we don't have too much time to waste.
This system allows for hands-free search via voice, which would be great for people who have physical disabilities.
As a school psychologist, I can see many uses for this sort of set-up to support what I do at work. I can envision interactive assessments on this table- if you work in education or psychology, or if you are interested in this sort of technology, leave a comment!
--XEO Design Inc.
