Assignment 1

Listen To Wikipedia

Listen To Wikipedia

Although most people use Wikipedia on a daily basis, it is difficult to appreciate the scale of the web site. Listen To Wikipedia, a real-time audio-visualization of Wikipedia edits, helps effectively conceptualize that Wikipedia is one of the largest information libraries on the Internet. This application monitors all edits being made to Wikipedia by displaying circles for each edit made on the site. The size of each circle corresponds to the size of the edit and the colors represent the type of user making the change. Since Wikipedia edits are comprised of both addition and removal of text, Listen to Wikipedia complements the display of circles by playing bells sounds when additions are made, and strings sounds when subtractions are made. Listen To Wikipedia is interesting because it becomes easy to understand how dynamic Wikipedia is when seeing and listening to this project. Stéfan Sinclair explains that  interactive visualizations allow for the presentation of data that is sequential and iterative. As opposed to a static visualization, which would have provided a high level, generalized view of the types of edits made to Wikipedia, this project provides a live data stream of edits. This not only ensures that the viewer will never see the same information twice, but also gives them the ability to see exactly what pages are being updated. The high frequency of sounds and circles appearing on the screen gives the viewer a better level of understanding and information as compared to what we would see on a static graph.

 

PaperscapePaperscape

As Warren Weaver explained in his article entitled “Science and Complexity” (1948), our modern society is dealing with “Problems of Organized Complexity.” We have access to large amounts of data, and need to find the ways of linking them in useful ways. This issue of finding the right data is prominent in the research community. When looking for research papers, it is often hard to find exactly what you are looking for. Paperscape eliminates this issue by visually mapping out research papers. This network visualization helps bring order to the complexity of finding research data by grouping and coloring different categories. Each paper is represented by dot, and is placed in a cluster of similarly colored dots, where each cluster covers the same topic. The size of each dot shows how often the paper has been cited and the dots are linked by similarities in citations. This dynamic visualization makes it much easier to explore research topics, compared to conventional search mechanisms. The versatility of this interface allows the visualization to be used in many ways. Rather than sifting through lists of papers, Paperscape makes it possible to find an interesting topic, see the most popular papers in that field, and find closely linked papers, all in one interface. As a result, it can be useful for non-experts to find gain a basic understanding of a topic by looking at the most cited papers for that topic (represented by the larger dots). Alternatively, experts in a field are able to find less common papers related to a certain subtopic by looking at smaller dots surrounding papers they are already familiar with. Experts can also find related subtopics to ones they are interested in by looking at nearby clusters of dots. This workflow provides a more intuitive and useful means of discovering new information for all researchers.


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