nonsite

In the research I’ve been doing around mapping, graphing and the visual representation of ideas, I keep bumping up into amazing projects which gather live information from the internet not just for information visualization, but that explore the expressive potential of information. Eric Rodenbeck at Stamen Design and live dynamic displays he did for Digg Labs and his taxi project Cabspotting for San Francisco, where you see the locations of every cab in San Francisco at a particular time are a good examples. He plotted of every cab location over a 31 day period in 2007. The result is a beautiful ghost map of the Bay area.

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s we feel fine project is another amazing project- ideosyncratic but very elegant- tracking and interpreting the feelings of bloggers everywhere. These feelings are then catagorized and listed based on frequency, gender, age, weather, location, and so on.

Moving your mouse over the screen causes the bouncing dots to cluster and clicking then selects that particular feeling- like feeling real, tells you how long ago it was posted and from where. Another click will take you to that blog. Recently posted pictures are also graphed and organized. Technically I have no idea how these projects are done, but I admire the creativity and the results are amazing representations of a very large internet community.