Sandbox

The Newsletter for December is out

December 25th, 2008 by Nico Luchsinger

We just sent out our third newsletter. This month’s topic is INFORMATION VISUALIZATION. We also tell you about our cooperation with the LIFT conference in Geneva (and how you can get in there with a discount). If you’re not subscribed to our newsletter yet, but like to do so, click here. You can read the full newsletter after the jump.

Dear friends,

This is the Sandbox newsletter for December. Because most of you have already received a newsletter from us in the past, we moved all the administrative stuff down to the last section, so that we can start right away with the good stuff

Reading time is about 5 minutes.

I. OPEN YOUR EYES

Never before in the history of man have we had access to so much information, so much data so easily as we have today. Thanks to the internet, we can get our hands on an incredibly vast amount of knowledge about nearly anything. And it’s not just about access: Anybody can add his own data to the pool, making it grow at an amazing rate.

But, to freely quote a great movie: With great data always comes great confusion. The sheer amount of information makes it impossible to process and to comprehend for any human being. But luckily, there are creative solutions to the problem that can be summarized under INFORMATION VISUALIZATION – the topic of this newsletter.

Now, of course, there has been visualization before the internet: charts, graphs and maps have been around for a long time. But the web not only enlarged the data pool to be visualized – it also gives us innumerous tools to visualize, often interactively. It’s safe to say that we’re only at the beginning of this, and that we are rapidly moving towards a new form of visualization-based information processing.

A good introduction into the vast field of information visualization is this talk (ca. 30 mins) by Eric Rodenbeck, founder of the great design agency Stamen, who showcases some of their work in the field. Consider the Digg Labs that provide several ways to display the activity on the news aggregation site Digg, for example as a swarm or a stack; or the Trulia Hindsight project that displays the development of urban areas over time. Both visualizations allow to very quickly capture a data set that would have been impossible to fully understand in text form because it is either changing in real time (like Digg) or just incredibly vast (Trulia).

Another magician of visualization is the “internet artist” Jonathan Harris. He gave an amazing talk at TED that gives a good overview of his work, but we recommend that you also go and look at some of the projects. Our favorite is “We feel fine”, that displays the current “mood” of the blogosphere by searching the world’s blogs for the phrase “I feel…” and then aggregating whatever comes after. With this, you can learn for example that the blogosphere feels 3.7 times as happy as usual at the moment. Of course, you may question whether one can quantify feelings just by searching blog posts for certain phrases. But the important thing of Harris’ project is that it turns a vast and anonymous data set – the blogosphere – into something tangible and experienceable and thus creates a sort of intimacy. Recently, the website Twistori applied Harris’ concept for data from microblogging service Twitter.

Visualization, combined with statistical data, also helps to close some of your knowledge gaps and debunk a lot of myths. This is the goal of the amazing Gapminder, a simple but very powerful visualization tool that allows you to explore the correlation between hundreds of statistical indicators from UN statistics. Gapminder was built by the team of Hans Rosling – and of course, there is a TED talk to watch

Finally, visualization methods can also be applied to search (and find) information on the web. One great tool is Cooliris, a browser plugin that lets you browse pictures and videos on the web in a stunning 3-D gallery. And a cute one is Amaztype that displays search results from Amazon by forming the keyword you entered with the cover images of the results.

(Special thanks to our designer Thierry Blancpain for a lot of inputs on this section!)

II. DON’T LOOK BACK

We’re proud to announce our partnership with the LIFT conference that will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, from February 25-27. LIFT explores the social consequences of new technologies, and the 2009 edition is inspired by the question “Where did the future go?”

Sandbox and LIFT will co-host a dinner during the conference, where a select group of talents from the Sandbox network and LIFT attendees will come together to discuss some of issues of the conference in more depth. We will send out invitations to the dinner shortly, but if you plan to come to the conference or are in or near Geneva in February and feel that you should attend, please contact us!

LIFT also offers a 20% discount on the conference tickets for the members of the Sandbox network. Just use the promotional code “Lift09special20″ when registering at http://liftconference.com/user/register.

III. WATCH CLOSELY

As always, here follows a list of tips and links we found interesting in no particular order.

MusicBox is the Master thesis of Anita Lillie at the MIT Media Lab. She develops a tool that visually displays your music collection. Thanks to Alex for the link! (and yes, we could also have put this in the chapter on visualization…)

If you’re a writer, there are a lot of prices you want to receive, but the Bad Sex Awards probably are not among them. Handed out every year by the english magazine “Literary review”, they award badly written passages with sexual content. Have a loot at this year’s winners.

Photographer Richard Howe took pictures of every street corner in Manhattan (around 11’000 in total).

Telescopic Text by Joe Davis is a great way to tell a story on a website. It starts with “I made tea” – but there are more layers to the story.

Recently, Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Tipping Point” and “Blink”, published his new book “Outliers“. While the overall message seems sort of obvious to us (success is not only the product of talent, but also of chance and cultural heritage), the book is entertainingly written and packed with anecdotes that illustrate this point.

IV. TALK TO US!

We love to hear from you – whether you’d like to comment on something you’ve read here, send us an interesting link or just want to say Hi. You can simply reply to this e-mail, or you can connect to us on our webpage, on Facebook or on Twitter:

http://www.sandbox-network.com
http://www.facebook.com/pforti?ref=nf#/pages/Sandbox/12153422357
http://www.twitter.com/sandbox_network

You are receiving this newsletter because you were in contact with us or subscribed on our webpage. If you prefer not to receive our updates, please just reply to this email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

…AND FINALLY, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

We would like to thank you all for your support in this last year. We wish you all merry Christmas, a happy new year and look forward to seeing you in 2009!

Your Sandbox team: Antoine, Christian, Fabian, Nico and Severin

This newsletter is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/ch/