serendipityoucity

Slashgeo had an entry entitled Ivy League Propaganda Cartograms in reference to The International Network Archives which assembles

data sets relevant to empirical research on mapping the global web in a central location and to standardize them so the various indicators can be combined. Given the immense amount of work that defining a global web involves we argue for disseminating the raw data as widely as possible so as to recruit the largest possible number of collaborators.
Specific project components include:

• Collecting various network data sets (e.g. communication, trade, tourism, policy issues, migration)
• Establishing a uniform format for these so that they can be combined in models
• Making data publicly available on our Website

Not such a bad thing i reckon!  Also interesting to note that these folks are sociologists and not geographers!  They have data sets on weapons, communication, drugs, piracy, tourism, trade, and etc.  The INA creates network maps and are developing interesting ways to visualize data and turn it into fascinating interconnected information. Even the INA’s home page has a provocative image of a salt trader looking on his laptop while standing beside his camel in the middle of the desert.

The infographics by Jonathan Harris on the INA site are somewhat garish and noisy, but do effectively communicate. They are also excellent boundary objects that can be used to stimulate discussion in any classroom setting.  The New Internationalist Magazine uses a very similar style of mapping.

The INA interactive non geographic maps are considered a proposal for a new system of cartography.  This is a stretch since these are network visualizations and people like Alan MacEachren and many others have been doing exactly this type of cartography for quite some time.  I do however like that the INA is experimenting and i can’t wait to see what they come up with once they move out of flash based maps and well maybe gets some geographers on board.

Harris’ work outside the INA is however really fascinating.  In Word Count he created an

interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence. Each word’s size reflects its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

The word peace is ranked at #1155 while war is #307, gun is #2808 and hug is way down the line at #14936.  The spurious fun to be had is endless!   

His work 10 X 10 is incredible and it makes what i said yesterday seem like mere child’s play.  He develops algorithms to study and capture snapshots of events on then represent these in visualizations of what we were collectively thinking and portraying or at least what Reuters, BBC and NYTimes were saying and showing at a specific time.

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

And as for propaganda, well it is defined as 

a specific type of message presentation directly aimed at influencing the opinions of people, rather than impartially providing information. Literally translated from the Latin gerundive as "things which must be disseminated".

As if there was such a thing as purely objective information representations!  We choose to show what we choose to see captured with the technology we choose to purchase which is always a subjective process even if the pictures seem "scientific".  It is true that these maps are trying to conjure some kind of emotion to influence our opinions, and Harris’ other work does this in a more subtle fashion, but alas, in the end, i think that Harris and the INA are providing us with a kind of public service by revealing and making obvious some cultural & social trends on critically important themes.  This is what cartographers and people like Tufte in his books Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy have been doing for ever.

I truly love the innovation in Harris’ works, they are dynamic elegant mathematically derived visualizations depicting very complex social phenomena that tell us something about ourselves. There is no dogma, no long report, just simple exquisite, esthetic and intelligent play!