Recently I moved in Paris, working at Sciences Po for the Médialab. Actually I am part of the AIME team headed by Bruno Latour who recently has published An Inquiry into modes of existence.

AIME is not meant simply to be a volume, rather an expanded book. This means that — on the side of the paper version — the book has been augmented by a digital part. AIME enriches the reading with dynamic index and glossary, but moreover it allows users to contribute at the Latour’s book. In this fashion the book is not a frozen work on bookshelves, but it becomes alive changing in time.

Image

My colleague Benjamin Sylvand, with the help of Ian Gray, released a video on a recent exhibition on the golden age of nautical charts, which took place at the BNF. The video, produced for the FORECCAST project, is composed by several recordings in which the curator, Hélène Richards, introduces interesting ways to use these maps.

Bruno Latour explains what AIME is.

Finally I am at the end of student career. After three years of Computer Science, I am going to finish the Master’s Degree in Psychology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. To design an interface to manage thesauri is the subject of the thesis that has been written with the help of Gabriella Pasi, Carlo Ferigato and Luca Bernardinello. This work is important for me because it is part of the project at the JRC of Ispra, carried out in collaboration with FAO, BGS and BNCF.

The thesis is going to be presented tomorrow at Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan (map) during the conference L’Italia delle Biblioteche. The collateral presentation is organized by AIDA and Piero Cavaleri in Sala Verdi.

The day after tomorrow the thesis is going to be officially discussed at the University of Milan-Bicocca at the Department of Psychology.

The thesis is in Italian, I hope to have the time to translate it. Click on the image to get the full pdf of the thesis or click Il tesauro non è un dinosauro.

Thesis Cover

The thesaurus is not a dinosaurus, presentation cover of thesis

Recensioni:
Frammenti Semantici

On 7 and 8 of May I am going to attend to the Italian IA Summit in Pisa. For the conference Marta Motta and I will present a work whose title is Il Thesaurus del Nuovo soggettario interpreta SKOS. The paper, which regards a case of study about the SKOS use, is the result of a collaboration between the National Central Library of Florence and the Joint Research Centre, European Commission.

Pisa by Harald Haeusler, Flickr

If you work on Google Earth, you really have the sensation to manipulate something. To have the capability to move and rotate a model of the Earth is really powerful, especially in information visualization. In fact more the user is involved in the interaction with something, more the interaction becomes transparent. And transparency of the interaction layer means direct connection to information.

Anyway Google Earth is an application which requires more study. I haven’t see very exciting examples of information visualization, but two works worth to be cited. One is an animation of international flights from the most important USA airports, the other is a really nice visualization of world oil consumption. In the picture, the red color represents on the left the USA and on the right the China oil consumption.

World Oil Consumption

World Oil Consumption by John Jason Fallows

Since I am working on Google Earth, I am interested in good examples of geographical visualization realized through Google applications. In this list I can easy include in.fondo.al.mar, a information-visualization project aimed to reveal the positions of maritime sinkings and incidents.

I really appreciate the possibility to switch among different data views: Map, Chronology, Statistics, Archive. I think that focusing different faces of the same data is important to have a good insight of displayed information.

The project has been realized by David Boardman and  Paolo Gerbaudo.

in.fondo.al.mar picture

in.fondo.al.mar by information aesthetics

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