Interface and Data Visualisation

Circulation of Opinions in Visualization Reading

D. Rodighiero 

Visualizations need interpretation as a way to grasp the meaning of visual representation. They are complex, and often the process of creation is hidden to the public. Because of this, the following text illustrates a way to read the visual representation of data by analysing the reading in three intervals: detail, visualization, and context. These three different moments make explicit the structure of reading, which will end with the interpretation—the moment in which the observer gets insights and becomes conscious about a personal kind of knowledge. Interpretation, which is composed of personal opinions, is a very important medium to keep the information circulating and to permit an open dialogue with other observers who are reading the same visualization, even in the medical field. In this paper the photography of Luigi Ghirri will illustrate the schematic approach; successively, the three intervals will be exemplified using a medical example, where my parents will be involved in the reading of a blood test. The simple idea is that, through the circulation of opinions and the dialogue, visualization interpretation will foster the creation of a common knowledge and improve the capacity of reading by each single observer.

Self-Recognition in Data Visualization: how people see themselves in social visualizations

D. Rodighiero; L. Cellard 

Self-recognition is an intimate act performed by people. Inspired by Paul Ricoeur, we reflect upon the action of self-recognition, especially when data visualization represents the observer itself. Along the article, the reader is invited to think about this specific relationship through concepts like the personal identity stored in information systems, the truthfulness at the core of self-recognition, and the mutual-recognition among community members. In the context of highly interdisciplinary research, we unveil two protagonists in data visualization: the designer and the observer – the designer as the creator and the observer as the viewer of a visualization. This article deals with some theoretical aspects behind data visualization, a discipline more complex than normally expected. We believe that data visualization deserves a conceptual framework, and this investigation pursues this intention. For this reason, we look at the designer as not just a technician in the visualization production, but as a contemporary ethnologist – the designer as a professional working in a social environment to comprehend the context and formulate a specific inquiry with the help of appropriate visual languages.

Reading Data Together

D. Rodighiero 

Network visualizations are the most complex visualizations possible, but sometimes they are not capable of describing system-complexity. Even if they are the most widely employed visualization techniques, they still have limitations. Indeed a) their relations are not sufficient to analyse complexity and b) networks do not distinguish between qualitative differences of represented entities. Starting from the actual network model, how could one manipulate this visualization to improve complexity comprehension? In this paper, we propose a solution called trajectory. The trajectory has two major points of difference compared to the network: the trajectory a) represents not only distances, but also durations, and b) it displays kinetic entities according to their evolution with time. The discourse is articulated around these four points. Considering that networks are tools widely used by digital humanists, we propose a new language to improve the quality of represented data: a new network based on a vertical timeline. Complexification of the network visualization is not just a new language, but also a tool that would give the field of Digital Humanities the most complex of all possible visualizations.

Two lectures about representing scientific communities by data visualization

D. Rodighiero 

These lectures present a research that investigates the representation of communities, and the way to foster their understanding by different audiences. Communities are complex multidimensional entities intrinsically difficult to represent synthetically. The way to represent them is likely to differ depending on the audience considered: governing entities trying to make decision for the future of the community, general public trying to understand the nature of the community and the members of the community themselves. This work considers two types of communities as example: a scientific organization and an arising domain: the EPFL institutional community composed of faculty members and researchers and, at a world wide level, the emerging community of Digital Humanities researchers. For both cases, the research is organised as a process going from graphical research to actual materialization as physical artefacts (posters, maps, etc.), possibly extended using digital devices (augmented reality applications). Through iterative cycles of design and experimentation, the research explores theoretically (representation theory, studies about networks, cartography, etc.) and experimentally (development of methods to assess the relevance of each representation depending on the target audiences) how to create effective community mapping. Its global ambition is to inform a theory of design helping to understand how certain community representations can lead to actual cognitive shifts in the way a community is understood.

First Day – Design Creation

The lecture proposes a new way to look at scientific communities. Dealing with a very complex situation, where literacy production is enormous and decisions are made using metrics that are judged obsolete by all, we propose a visual way to understand the community organization. How do scholars work together? What is the intermediary object which makes scientific researchers work together? This first session transforms the current situation into a visual object, a design artefact that embodies the elemental in the creation of maps to understand and evaluate scientific communities.

Second Day – Use of the Maps

The lecture proposes the use of maps to understand and evaluate scientific communities. As continuation of yesterday’s lecture, the topic of the day is how to present elementary objects—which represents publications, teaching, grants and subjects of matters—in a map. Several maps will be shown, representing a precise scientific community inside the EPFL, but with the perspective to make them adaptable to other communities. Moreover, much attention will be dedicated to the reading and interpretation of these maps. Finally a web-based software will be introduced, to illustrate to members and managers of any given community the benefit of a visual representation of a scientific organisation.

La Ville Analogue, la Carte

D. Rodighiero 

This new publication of The Analogous City, an artwork produced by Aldo Rossi, Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1976, is part of a museographic installation for the exhibition Aldo Rossi – The Window of the Poet at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. To gauge and explore this seminal work, Archizoom relied on Dario Rodighiero, candidate on the Doctoral Programme for Architecture and Sciences of the Cities, and designer at the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLAB) at EPFL. Conceived as a genuine urban project, The Analogous City displays an aggregation of architectures drawn from collective and personal memories. What happens if we isolate the forms that Aldo Rossi and his friends so consciously placed in relation to each other? Rodighiero simply decomposed it into the original references and then returned the pieces to the artwork, thus allowing us to simultaneously see the work and its visual vocabulary. An application based on augmented reality has been created to work in tandem with this publication by displaying the complete references belonging to the collage on different layers suspended over the artwork. By downloading the free application and installing it on your tablet or mobile phone, you can recreate the interaction of the museum installation whenever and wherever you are.

The Trajectories Tool: Amplifying Network Visualization Complexity

A. Rigal; D. Rodighiero; L. Cellard 

Network visualizations are the most complex visualizations possible, but sometimes they are not capable of describing system-complexity. Even if they are the most widely employed visualization techniques, they still have limitations. Indeed a) their relations are not sufficient to analyse complexity and b) networks do not distinguish between qualitative differences of represented entities. Starting from the actual network model, how could one manipulate this visualization to improve complexity comprehension? In this paper, we propose a solution called t rajectory. The trajectory has two major points of difference compared to the network: the trajectory a) represents not only distances, but also durations, and b) it displays kinetic entities according to their evolution with time. The discourse is articulated around these four points. Considering that networks are tools widely used by digital humanists, we propose a new language to improve the quality of represented data: a new network based on a vertical timeline. Complexification of the network visualization is not just a new language, but also a tool that would give the field of Digital Humanities the most complex of all possible visualizations.

The DHLAB Trajectory

D. Rodighiero; A. Rigal; L. Cellard 

This visualisation represents the research activity of the Digital Humanities Lab through publications and co-authorship. Vertical disposition is ordered by time: each layer is a different year of publications, from the lab’s foundation to nowadays. The layers displays the collaboration networks: two researchers are linked if they published together. The vertical trajectories represent the activity of a researcher through the time. The authors position is fix in the space. As consequence, the trajectories become a linear representation of collaborations continuity. The laboratory is here transformed in a geometrical structure which evolves in time despite the members instability.

The Analogous City, The Map

D. Rodighiero 

This new publication of The Analogous City, an artwork produced by Aldo Rossi, Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1976, is part of a museographic installation for the exhibition Aldo Rossi – The Window of the Poet at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. To gauge and explore this seminal work, Archizoom relied on Dario Rodighiero, candidate on the Doctoral Programme for Architecture and Sciences of the Cities, and designer at the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLAB) at EPFL. Conceived as a genuine urban project, The Analogous City displays an aggregation of architectures drawn from collective and personal memories. What happens if we isolate the forms that Aldo Rossi and his friends so consciously placed in relation to each other? Rodighiero simply decomposed it into the original references and then returned the pieces to the artwork, thus allowing us to simultaneously see the work and its visual vocabulary. An application based on augmented reality has been created to work in tandem with this publication by displaying the complete references belonging to the collage on different layers suspended over the artwork. By downloading the free application and installing it on your tablet or mobile phone, you can recreate the interaction of the museum installation whenever and wherever you are.

Representing the Digital Humanities Community: Unveiling The Social Network Visualization of an International Conference

D. Rodighiero 

This paper deals with the sense of represent- ing both a new domain as Digital Humanities and its community. Based on a case study, where a set of visualizations was used to represent the community attending the international Digital Humanities conference of 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland, the meaning of representing a community is investigated in the light of the theories of three acknowledged authors, namely Charles Sanders Peirce for his notion of the interpretant, Ludwig Wittgenstein for his insights on the use of language, and finally Bruno Latour for his ideas of representing politics. There results a proposal to designing and interpreting social network visualizations in a more thoughtful way, while remaining aware of the relation between objects in the real world and their visualizations. As this type of work pertains to a wider scope, we propose bringing a theoretical framework to a young domain such as data visualization.

Digital Humanities 2014: representing a controverted definition

D. Rodighiero 

The network portrays all keywords used in the Digital Humanities 2014 conference, which will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland. The keywords‚ represented by nodes‚have been freely chosen by each author attending the conference, contributed via their papers and posters. Edges represent keywords appearing together in a contribution. The weight of the edges measures the occurrence of keywords pairs, multiplied by the number of authors creating them. The visualization is meant as a talking point, to foster a debate about the controversial definition of the Digital Humanities domain.

Trajectoire d’une représentation cartographique en réseau

A. Rigal; D. Rodighiero 

Dans le cadre de la « Conférence internationale des Humanités Numériques » qui s’est tenue en 2014 à Lausanne, nous avons réalisé une cartographie en réseau des auteurs et des mots-clés de la conférence. Les cartes en résultant sont reproduites sur divers objets : bâche, tapis, ouvrages, posters, tasses. Ces derniers avaient pour fonction de susciter l’intérêt des auteurs et leur identification au champ des humanités numériques. La qualité de la cartographie en réseau est qu’elle exclut peu d’acteurs et dans notre cas peu de participants. De ce fait un grand nombre de participants à la conférence a pu se trouver sur la représentation et par là prendre part au collectif suggéré par les liens de la cartographie. Par ces reproductions, qui ne sont jamais vraiment mécaniques, la représentation a circulé en alimentant des interprétations qui tracent les contours d’un collectif propre à la conférence. Les traces fabriquées par les participants – commentaires de la cartographie, photos, souvenirs, tweets, etc. -, rendent possible de suivre la trajectoire de la représentation. Par conséquent, savoir si la représentation a réussi revient à enquêter sur l’étendue et la qualité de sa trajectoire entre les épreuves. L’enjeu de cette communication est donc d’enquêter sur le design cartographique en tant qu’art du rassemblement, grâce aux outils du design cartographique.

A Network Analysis Approach of the Venetian Incanto System

Y. Rochat; M. Fournier; A. Mazzei; F. Kaplan 

The objective of this paper was to perform new analyses about the structure and evolution of the Incanto system. The hypothesis was to go beyond the textual narrative or even cartographic representation thanks to network analysis, which could potentially offer a new perspective to understand this maritime system.

Modeling Venice’s maritime network – End 13th to Mid. 15th centuries

M. Fournier; Y. Rochat 

Character networks in Les Confessions from Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Y. Rochat; F. Kaplan 

A social network analysis of Rousseau’s autobiography “Les Confessions”

Y. Rochat; F. Kaplan; C. Bornet 

We propose an analysis of the social network composed of the characters appearing in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographic Les Confessions, with existence of edges based on co-occurrences. This work consists of twelve volumes, that span over fifty years of his life. Having a unique author allows us to consider the book as a coherent work, unlike some of the historical texts from which networks often get extracted, and to compare the evolution of patterns of characters through the books on a common basis. Les Confessions, considered as one of the first modern autobiographies, has the originality to let us compose a social network close to the reality, only with a bias introduced by the author, that has to be taken into account during the analysis. Hence, with this paper, we discuss the interpretation of networks based on the content of a book as social networks. We also, in a digital humanities approach, discuss the relevance of this object as an historical source and a narrative tool.

Analyse de réseaux sur les Confessions de Rousseau

Y. Rochat; F. Kaplan