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Donato Ricci spoke with Pedro Miguel Cruz about his conception and practice of data visualization.This interview was conducted as an extension of seminar session #6, held on 15.05.14, where Cruz spoke about “Visualizing Complexity.” 1 Donato Ricci [DR]: Would you describe yourself as a computer scientist or a designer? Do you prefer one to the other? If not, why not? Or perhaps you consider yourself a storyteller? Pedro Miguel Cruz [PMC]: That goes into the core definition of infoviz as an intersection of several fields. I started in Physics Engineering so I had some training in dealing in solving analytical problems […]

Data Processors // David Foster Wallace on Information

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[img: Atelier Bow-Wow, Miyashita Park, Tokyo, 2011, via Detail, das Architektur Portal] ‘The common misapprehension is that a messy desk is a sign of a hard worker.’ ‘Get over the idea that your function here is to collect and process as much information as possible.’ ‘The whole mess and disorder of the desk on the left is, in fact, due to excess information.’ ‘A mess is information without value.’ ‘The whole point of cleaning off a desk is to get rid of the information you don’t want and keep the information you do want.’ ‘Who cares which candy wrapper is […]

BarCamp // 26 & 27.06.14 @ ENSCI

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Welcome to the program page for the seminar’s BarCamp. You will find all the details on the BarCamp, the cases and datasets we plan to treat, and ways to participate in the two-day event. If you want to sign up right away, please click here; otherwise, read on. I. BarCamp A BarCamp is a participatory workshop geared toward either the development of web applications or the exploration of datasets using existing software tools and ad hoc code. We are focusing our BarCamp on the exploration of a set of pre-selected and pre-treated datasets. Our goals are two-fold: 1) to give […]

DMT7: Spatializing Data // 05.06.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: Lévy & Chavanier, A Cartogramme: Switzerland: Referendum on Minarets, 2009] In addition to the problem of how to graphically treat and visualize data (dealt with in the previous session), are a series of underlying questions about the metaphors, metonyms and metrics we deploy to translate the digital into the spatial (Levy, 2012). When we invoke digital “mapping” tools, or talk about “spatializing” our networks through tools such as Gephi, we are making loose references to practices and techniques of the field of cartography. The session will unpack the relationship between web cartography and traditional cartography by taking a long […]

Digital Methods // 02.06.14 @ College de France

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Le College is holding its first Symposium related to the digital turn in the social sciences: “Big Data, entreprise et sciences sociales – Usages et partages des donnees numerique en masse.” The session is being organized by Pierre-Michel Menger, a professor at the College and sociologist at EHESS whose research focuses on innovation in labor markets and systems of work and production in the arts sector. The symposium includes 10 interventions on topics ranging from the interaction of emerging quantitative methodologies with more traditional methods of social sciences and the nature of the knowledge produced for policy the more we rely on […]

Newsrooms confronting the digital gap

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[img: n.a. Screen Shot, Nieman Journalism Lab,  2014］ Leaked NYTimes internal report takes an honest look at how the paper is still struggling to adapt its news-making (and packaging and selling) practices to survive the changing media consumption habits of its readers and the increasingly nimble and disruptive digital strategies of new competitors; non-traditional news entities that make better use of its existing content, or master the authority games of search engine algorithms better than the Times. Interesting to compare this report with our previous session on the Web as Transformative and Bocowszki’s work on Argentinian newsrooms and their web-page […]

DMT6: Visualizing complexity // 15.05.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: Pedro Miguel Cruz, Empires decline – revisited, 2010］ Early data visualizations in science ordered information in tree-like representations to address issues of classification and genealogy. The Encyclopédie’s Systême figuré des connaissances humaines and Darwin’s Tree of life are classical examples of this first period of data visualization. The recent shift towards issues of organized complexity in scientific inquiry (Weaver, 1948) has changed the practice of visualization, marking a transition from trees to networks. Despite a rich stream of research, network visualization still lacks a basic grammar of standardized graphic presentation as that advocated by Willard Brinton (Brinton, 1939) and […]

DMT5: Transformative interactions: web effects on social dynamics // 17.04.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: David Chavalarias, Attention streams in the blogosphere, 2010］ This seminar will address a critical question in the application of digital methods for social science research. The web is not merely a new resource that, through the treatment of large collections of data, lets us falsify or verify long- held assumptions about the relationships between institutional culture, individual behavior and other key concepts in the social sciences. The web itself is changing the way institutions function (such as how news is produced [Bozkowski, 2009] or science gets published [Evans, 2008]), as well as how individuals interact (social networking sites offer […]

Demystifying Networks // Practical introduction

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[img: Scott Weingart, Networks Demystified, 2014］ Network graphs and network spatialization software lurk constantly in the background of our seminar and are a core tool in the visualization of digitally derived data (think Rogers, Leydersdorff, Cointet, Lermercier and Marres). But it is not a topic that we’ve addressed head on yet. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of tinkering around with Gephi, CoreText Manager or other software, or for those looking for a little primer on networks, here is a very helpful step-by-step introduction by Scott Weingert, from the Information Science Department at the University of Indiana, […]

DMT4: Natively digital data mapping // 10.04.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: Noortje Marres, Mapping WCIT with Twitter: Issue and Hashtag Profiles, 2012］ Thirty years ago, the democratization of IT radically changed the way we access, generate and manage information. The Internet has amplified and accelerated this phenomenon, producing ever increasing amounts of “natively digital data” (Rogers, 2013). This has fostered numerous studies of online culture, where researchers have turned to user-populated platforms such as Twitter to detect the associative practices of novel communities, or to sites such as Wikipedia where recent studies compare the controversality of topics on different language sections of the online encyclopedia (Yasseri, 2012). Beyond these specific […]

DMT3: Digitized archives and distant reading // 27.03.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: n.a., Philologia, 2012］ The growing digitization of our textual and literary heritage has convinced many academics and observers of higher education that we are currently experiencing a renaissance in the Humanities. Some scholars argue that this mass of data is profoundly changing the methodological toolbox of a field whose scholarship is traditionally based on close reading and interpretation of texts. Digitization has rendered novels, plays, poems and historical texts open to forms of statistical analysis and visualization methods previously unavailable to these objects. As a result, this “digital turn” is creating a vivid debate within the Humanities about the […]

Rencontres des Ateliers: Paolo Ciuccarelli // 20.03.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: Density Design, Italian Design Research Map, 2008］ As part of ENSCI’s and ESADSE’s 2014 program of design-related conferences, Paolo Ciuccarelli will be giving a talk on the visual representation of complex urban, social and organizational phenomena at ENSCI-Les Ateliers on March 20th 2014. Paolo Ciuccarelli is the head of the Communication Design Research Group, member of the Design PhD Board at Politecnico di Milano and Scientific Director and founder of the DensityDesign Research Lab. His research and publishing activities focus on the development of data, information and knowledge visualization tools and methods, to support decision making processes in complex […]

DMT2: Mapping S&T through Structured Data // 06.03.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: Benjamin Raimbault, Pierre-Benoît Joly & Jean-Philippe Cointet, Synthetic Biology Emergence, 2013］ Scientometrics has pioneered the use of structured data to analyse the social and cognitive dynamics of science and technology. This has enabled the development of tools and methodological insights that are relevant for researchers using DMTs to study other social phenomena. The session will discuss the process of mapping scientific or technological data and show how the choice of thresholds, algorithms, layouts and scale affects interpretation. It will also address the politics of indicator design. Jean-Philippe Cointet, researcher at INRA SenS (Sciences en Société), will present recent work on […]

Scientometrics & Aliens // Editorial

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[img: n.a. Screen Shot, Scientometrics, 2014］ I have to believe that if the little green alien people came from a distant planet and communicated with us all else about them might be alien but they would know in some fashion or other such things as Planck’s Constant, the velocity of light and the Wave Equation. I believe they might also find reasonable points of correspondence with our scientometrics even if their social arrangements were utterly different from our own. De Solla Price, D.J., (1978), Editorial Statements. Scientometrics, 1(1), 7-8. doi:10.1007/BF02016836 (download)

DMT1: Inaugural session // 27.02.14 @ ENSCI

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[img: Richard Rogers, Digital Methods, 2013］ The inaugural session will introduce the recent technological and epistemological transition entailed by the advent of digital mapping tools (DMTs) in the social sciences. Richard Rogers, Director of the Digital Methods Initiative at University of Amsterdam will present how DMTs can be mobilized to explore social complexity and present a broad vision of the development of the tools now used in the cartography of information–both in research and and the private sector. Organizational aspects of the seminar will also be addressed, such as allocating literature presentations and inquiring about participants that would like to […]

Data visualisation: Is ugly the new smart // 27.02.14 @ British Library

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[img: William Farr, Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England 1848-49, 1852] On the same day as our seminar kick-off (if you want to attend, please remember to register at the following link), the British Library’s Digital Research Team is organizing a public event on “Data visualisation: Is ugly the new smart“. This coincides with the exhibition “Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight” held at British Library from 20 February 2014 to 26 May 2014.

Kinsey 2.0 // Tool & Paper

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[img: n.a. Screen Shot, porngram.sexualitics.org, 2014］ An interdisciplinary team of researchers has created a Google-Trends-like tool called Porngram that maps the evolution of keywords in the titles of 800,000 porn videos. (…) The research team – made up of five individuals (Baptiste Coulmont, Antoine Mazières, Mathieu Trachman, Jean-Philippe Cointet and Christophe Prieur) with skills across computer science, sociology, statistics, mathematics and gender studies – scraped the videos’ titles, tags, description, viewcount, comments, runtime, upload date (if available) and uploader username using a custom-made crawler. These were then analysed using a quantitative approach in a bid to try and understand the […]

Russian Geekography // 21.01.14 @ medialab Sciences Po

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[img: n.a. Screen Shot, medialab.sciences-po.fr, 2014] Preliminary findings/methodological insights of the research project “Comparative Geekography – Mapping Russian Computer Science Diaspora” will be presented on tuesday 21 January from 15:00 to 17:00 during a seminar held at Sciences Po’s médialab. More information can be found here.