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Geographer maps terrain of the soul

2007-06-28T10:00:10Z

Geographer maps terrain of the soul

Adrift in the world, professor Yi-Fu Tuan anchored himself as a pioneer in his field

By MARK JOHNSON
markjohnson@journalsentinel.com

Posted: June 23, 2007

The young geographer would tell strangers he was hunting uranium. In 1952, that explanation seemed more understandable than the truth about what he was doing in the desert.

Who would believe the broad, flat rocks called pediments had led this slender man, 98 pounds, into Arizona's San Pedro River Valleyto map remote country under a blazing sun? At night, he camped out in a beat-up Ford coupe, and read by Coleman lamp until, tired, he pulled down the seats and slept with his head by the steering wheel, his feet stretched back into the trunk.

Decades before Yi-Fu Tuan became one of America's pre-eminent geographers, before he came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught students to think about landscape in new ways, the Chinese native slept outside ghost towns. The dark outlines of buildings, human places eerily devoid of humans, sometimes scared him. He dreamed of ghostly figures wandering toward him.

One night he heard hooves.

Twin shotgun barrels poked through the Ford's window and a rancher on horseback demanded: What are you doing on my property? The startled geographer apologized and told the rancher his business - not the story about uranium hunting. He was just a graduate student from California come to learn from the desert. The rancher let him stay.

The truth was Tuan loved it there, the miles of mesquite and cactuses, the clean, sweet smell of sun-baked desert plants. People speak of "love at first sight," and mean another human.

Tuan fell in love with a place.

The geographer would talk about loving places; when it came to loving people, he kept silent.

* * *

Today, at 76, Tuan has officially retired from the field he helped to pioneer, humanist geography. During a long career, he broadened the study of places by leading geographers back to the human eyes that see and interpret those places.

But it was a lonely quest. In one of the few articles ever written about him, The Chronicle of Higher Education said Tuan "may be the most influential scholar you've never heard of."

In retirement, he still writes books (one was published in March, and two more are in various stages). Every day, even Christmas and New Year's, he walks the mile from his Madison apartment to his office on the third floor of Science Hall. He trudges through snow, a backpack slung over his narrow shoulders as if he were a student, and not a white-haired professor emeritus.

And he still uses geography to delve deep into the mind, somewhere the old textbooks with their lists of cities, crops and mountain ranges never went. The mental landscape he travels has no boundaries.

"In my 16 years as a resident in Madison I've sat almost daily in the lakefront café of the Memorial Union and watched the changing scenes over Lake Mendota ," he wrote in a letter from a 2002 collection. "Only yesterday, however, did it occur to me to wonder what I would see if I were a submersible at the bottom of the lake's cold, murky depths where sunlight never penetrates. And I'm a geographer! How extraordinarily limited and conventional one's perception is. We are very much creatures of the surface, condemned to superficiality (even in the imagination and thought)."

In fact, Tuan never let himself rest at the surface.

A half-century ago he ventured into the desert and met what he would call "my geographical double," a place of uncluttered beauty and open space, but also of barrenness and isolation.

There, Tuan found his inspiration for ideas on the human response to landscape: the fear or comfort that wells up inside us at the sight of a dark forest or a wide open plain. He began to create his own vision of geography, blending philosophy, art, psychology, religion and other disciplines to produce books with grand themes such as "Place, Art and Self."

"To Yi-Fu, geography is about a set of moral questions: who we are; how we should live in the world; how we should relate to the natural world and to ourselves; and what constitutes the good life," said Denis Cosgrove, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Such moral questions are not to be confused with issues such as global warming, the domain of environmental geographers. Tuan focused instead on subtler ways in which man transforms the natural world to suit his tastes. Humans shape garden hedges into swans. They raise animals as pets and force water to dance in fountains.

With such an approach, Tuan plowed new territory, largely by himself. Though admired by many geographers (this spring, colleagues named one of his articles the most significant in the 90-year history of the journal Geographical Review), he was imitated by few.

"I've developed my own way of thinking, but I'm always looking over my shoulder at what he's doing," said David Harvey, perhaps America's best-known geographer, now a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York.

In his own thinking, Tuan displayed unusual rigor, copying quotations and ideas from the books he read into elegant hardcover journals. Over the years, he filled 42 of these journals, each containing more than 200 pages of meticulous script and as precious to him as a wedding ring might be to a colleague.

"One of the things I fear losing the most is one of these books," he said, "because it's a whole life of reading and thinking that's gone."

But living so completely in a world of ideas proved a hard bargain. For one part of life to be so full, another had to go empty.

"There are two Yi-Fu Tuans," said Kevin Warnke, a former UW student who lived with Tuan for five months. "The brilliant, courageous, revolutionary professor. And the shy, lonely, anxious, hurt man who hates the thought of growing older alone, more isolated from society, no longer capable of remembering anecdotes, names, events, and eventually no longer able to take care of himself."

Both personalities found expression in the desert: the inspiration for his ideas, but also the mirror revealing something barren and nomadic in himself.

Tuan would write: "Socially I am likewise adrift for a simple reason - I am single. The one portable soil - family - in which an individual is given natural grounding is not available to me."

Although the desert suited this solitary life, he finally settled in the rolling hills of the Midwest, a place he called "a family landscape." He last saw the desert 25 years ago.

After Tuan retired in 1998, he wrote his autobiography, "Who Am I?" He published a book of his letters to colleagues. He wrote a travelogue about a visit to China, published this year. He wrote a book on religion, not yet in print. And then he started what may be his final book, on human goodness.

Over the years the geographer's focus on place became for Tuan an image in the rearview mirror, receding gradually as he journeyed down other roads.

"This is how life progresses," he said recently. "We all end up abandoning place. We die."

* * *

In popular imagination, geographers embody what Cosgrove called "a hairy-chested masculinity." They are hale, virile types, men like Robert Peary, who discovered the North Pole and was awarded one of the American Geographical Society's highest honors, the Cullum Medal.

Tuan was the antithesis, a man so slight he was recruited by the rowing team at Oxford for the role of coxswain (though he lacked the other important qualification, a drill sergeant's gift for barking commands).

In 1951, he boarded a train in New York and headed west past the famed 100th Meridian , the invisible line in the Great Plains that separates the moist, closed-in landscape of the eastern United States from the arid, expansive West.

From the train window, Tuan not only saw the West's "Big Sky," he felt it liberating him.

"This is the American Dream that you go west," he said. "That's your future."

Bound for the University of California at Berkeley , he told himself he was finished with the Old World.

To that point, Tuan's life had been rootless, a series of new people in a string of new places his family called "home": Tianjin; Nanjing; Shanghai; Kunming; Chongqing; Canberra; Sydney; Manila; London; Oxford. The endless moving burned into Tuan a temperament suited to geography, and to the desert.

"I have a dread - more than other people - of disorientation," he said.

The dread gripped him the first time he entered the rain forest as a teenager in the Philippines. It grips him still some evenings as he drives through Madison's dark maze of streets, lost and on the verge of stopping the car in despair.

Geography gave him a context for these feelings. The desert answered them, providing the long, clear view that rain forests and city streets denied him. The place soothed his fears and nourished his appetite for deep, philosophical questions.

The interest in philosophy stretched back to childhood when he'd had an unusual dream. In the dream, he was not being chased by monsters or fighting dragons. He was thinking. He was thinking that he was alive, and that being alive had one consequence. It meant he would die. The knowledge made him sweat and struggle until he woke up.

A decade later in the desert, Tuan came across cattle skulls, bleached white and smoothed by sun and sand.

"If that's what death means, so clean," he said, "I don't mind it so much."

* * *

In the San Pedro River Valley, rattlesnake country, Tuan found himself craving human contact. He could work alone in that "lunar beauty" for no more than five days at a stretch before returning to the run-down boarding house in Tucson that he used as his base in the early 1950s. Eventually, a colleague from Berkeley, David Harris, began accompanying him on his research.

Ten years passed. Tuan wrote his dissertation, taught at Indiana University , then moved to a job at the University of New Mexico . He went back into the desert with his old friend. Harris was now married and the father of two little girls. Except for the job, Tuan's circumstances were unchanged.

Watching Harris and his family, he observed that they were always "in place" in the world, because they had each other - they had "community."

"You can't have a community of one," Tuan said.

In the autumn of 1964, Landscape magazine published his first major article, "Mountains, Ruins and the Sentiment of Melancholy." Although mountains were a familiar subject in geographical journals, Tuan's opening sentences announced a new, literary approach. He focused on the way we view these dramatic features of the landscape and even use them in our poetry to evoke sadness.

"Mountains," he wrote, "are erosional ruins. They are the bare stumps of their former selves. They shall be leveled down."

Four years later, he examined another response to the natural world in his book, "The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God." The hydrologic cycle is the process by which oceans produce clouds that pass over mountains, depositing rain and feeding rivers that flow back into oceans. Tuan, now teaching at the University of Toronto, wrote of the cycle's "beautiful economy of means and ends," explaining why it made sense that men would view this as evidence of "a wise and provident God."

As his reputation flourished, he moved from Toronto to the University of Minnesota. There, Tuan resurrected an obscure word from a poem by W.H. Auden and made it the title of his best-known work, the 1974 book "Topophilia" (from the Greek words topos, meaning "place," and philia, meaning "love of"). The idea for a book about the love of place stemmed from the deep kinship he'd felt with the desert.

While writing "Topophilia," Tuan realized the existence of an equally powerful, but opposite force - a topophobia, or fear of places. This became the subject of his 1979 book, "Landscapes of Fear."

"In a sense," he wrote, "every human construction - whether mental or material - is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos. . . . Every dwelling is a fortress built to defend its human occupants against the elements; it is a constant reminder of human vulnerability."

After 15 years in Minnesota, Tuan moved once again, his own version of a midlife crisis.

"There is not a cloud in the sky, except for the distant thunder cloud of senility and death," he explained. "That, precisely, is the problem."

Other male faculty members dealt with midlife problems by divorcing their wives. Tuan viewed his move to UW in 1983 as something similar, a divorce in favor of a fresh, young partner - one who had been courting him.

With his next book, Tuan moved even further from conventional geography. "Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets" was a radical twist on the theme of man transforming nature. Geographers usually examine the ways we change nature for economic reasons, for example, digging into a mountain to extract coal. Tuan surprised colleagues by looking instead at the way humans adopt animals as pets - an act that shows our twin desires to dominate and love our fellow creatures.

Despite his penchant for working outside the mainstream, the mainstream embraced him. In 1987, the American Geographical Society awarded him its Cullum Medal, the same honor given to Peary, the polar explorer.

Tuan had come to embody an alternative to the rugged mountaineer geographer - the classroom sage. He wore a coat and tie to lectures. He played no music, showed no movies, displayed no visual images. In time, he even dispensed with maps. Students seemed to require no more of him than ideas.

Years later some would describe Tuan as almost an oracle.

"People never came in late, never left early. They never sat at the back of the class and chatted with their friends. He had their absolute attention," recalled Steven Hoelscher, a former student who now teaches in the departments of American studies and geography at the University of Texas.

"There was something about him that was distant. Students wouldn't dare interrupt him."

Outside class, Tuan was generous with his time, often sitting in coffeehouses with students, discussing the pianist Glenn Gould or his childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes.

Karen Till, one of his former students, recalled that Tuan often treated students to dinner and some, in turn, took him on outings to places such as Devil's Lake State Park in Baraboo. Students knew, she said, that "Yi-Fu doesn't get out." They felt protective of him.

"I did feel a sadness," said Till, who now teaches geography at the University of Minnesota. "I knew he wasn't married. It seemed to me he kept his personal life very private."

* * *

The man who knew and loved landscape was on shakier ground when it came to the landscape of the self.

He once wrote that he must have been quite lonely as a child, for he imagined often what it would be like to be someone else. In at least one sense, it could scarcely have been harder than being himself.

In adolescence, before he knew the word for it, Tuan noticed the first stirrings of attraction. But it was only later as a graduate student that he understood the way his heart leaned and the life it would mean. He knew how disapproving his father could be, had seen the old man's shock when a colleague took them to a play about Oscar Wilde.

To be homosexual, and especially to be labeled as such, "would make life difficult, if not miserable," Tuan thought. He felt love, but to act on it, he decided, "was out of the question." He could not be that person.

Decades passed, and he told no one his secret. He devoted himself to work, setting no boundaries there. Over the years, though, the cost of his choice became clear as one by one, friends settled into family life. No matter how close he felt to these friends, he knew that even in the smallest matters - whether to attend one of his lectures or help a son with homework - they would always choose their families over him.

In his office, Tuan kept a photo gallery of former students and their children.

"Like he'd adopted us," said Tim Cresswell, a former student who now teaches human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.

As the years went by, although attitudes toward homosexuality loosened, Tuan's self-imposed prohibition did not. In middle age, he felt it was too late to act. He would think himself no better than "a dirty old man." Moreover, there loomed the possibility he might fall in love with a student, something he feared would tarnish all he'd accomplished as a teacher.

In the end, he did what he'd always done. Each day he reported to the office decorated with photographs of other people's families. He taught. He wrote his books.

On Dec. 12, 1997, six months before his official retirement, Tuan taught his final class, telling friends that it was time to move aside and make way for younger geographers. Two years later he wrote his autobiography, choosing that moment to reveal his sexuality.

He did not wish to die carrying this secret, he explained. The life of the mind is about disclosure.

In Tuan's field, the disclosure "was commented upon, but didn't raise eyebrows or make people re-evaluate his work," Cosgrove said. Karen Till read her old teacher's book and found it "enormously brave," yet filled with sadness.

Tuan offered no cover stories, as he had years ago when explaining his presence in the desert. Faced with two complex loves, the geographer had chosen one.

"The flesh had its yearnings," he wrote, "but to an extraordinary degree the yearnings were subordinated to the charms and mysteries of the non-human earth."

A study of people and places

Humanist geography takes a broad approach to examining the way we relate to the world around us. The humanist geographer is interested in our cultural, social, psychological and moral behavior. In examining China, for example, a humanist geographer would go well beyond the traditional interest in economic factors to examine architecture, the aesthetic landscape, the love of nature and the moral nature of the Chinese as distinct from other groups. Based on membership in the Association of American Geographers, it's estimated there are more than 8,000 humanist geographers in the U.S.

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Historical atlas recommendations?

2007-03-15T09:16:23Z

I would love to get a quality historical atlas. I've always been fascinated by geography (won the geography bee twice in junior high -- what what?) and I would be very interested in a well-done, scholarly historical atlas or any such atlas for that matter. Any recommendations?

posted in Cartographie - 3 replies

Cartographer\GIS Job

2006-10-19T23:33:40Z

SALARY RANGE: 36,671.00 - 58,318.00 USD per year OPEN PERIOD: Tuesday, October 17, 2006
to Wednesday, November 01, 2006
SERIES & GRADE: GS-1370-07/09
POSITION INFORMATION: Full Time Career/Career Conditional
PROMOTION POTENTIAL: 12
DUTY LOCATIONS: few vacancies - Northern Virginia, VA
WHO MAY BE CONSIDERED:
U.S. Citizens and Status Candidates

JOB SUMMARY:

Love your country? We, at the Department of Interior (DOI), do too! The DOI is devoted to protecting and preserving the resources of this great nation, including National Parks and Landmarks, natural resources, and the well-being of communities, including those of Native American, Alaska Natives and affiliated Islanders.

The Offshore Mapping and Boundary Branch (MBB) of Minerals Management Service (MMS) are looking for a hard-working, ambitious person interested in advancement through progressive knowledge and experience. The full-performance level of this position is a GS-12!

If selected for this position you will have the opportunity to assist with the support of the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and provide technical support to Headquarters, the Geographer’s Office of the National Ocean Service (NOW), Coastal Service Center, Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), private industry, and academia to name a few. You just don’t get the opportunity for this exposure everyday.

You will also have the opportunity to work with, digital Official Protraction Diagrams, Leasing Maps, Planning Area Maps, Five-year Plan graphics, Sand and Gravel Program, Alternative Energy initiatives, and a variety of special graphics and datasets. And you will assist with the development of metadata and associated standards to facilitate data collection, documentation, maintenance, access, and dissemination. And the opportunities keep coming! Apply today before it is too late!

If selected for this position you will have the opportunity to provide support for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and provide technical support to Headquarters, the Geographer’s Office of the National Ocean Service (NOW), Coastal Service Center, Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), private industry, and academia to name a few.

You will also have the opportunity to serve as the Division and Branch expert and provide training support to both as well as various MMS organizational elements concerning automated cartographic and mapping activities, and you will represent the branch and/or agency at professional scientific meetings, work on task force assignments, and special assignments as requested. This is a huge opportunity: Apply today!

This position is located in Herndon, VA, and requires a potential 15-20 days per month of travel and possible extended periods of travel primarily to Lakewood, Co during the first year.

Relocation Expenses WILL BE paid.

KEY REQUIREMENTS:

* U.S. Citizenship
posted by:

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ipod transit maps

2005-09-26T13:21:40Z

Transit maps on your ipod photo! William Bright thought it would be handy to create a website where you could download maps and of course to openly share his idea to the world so people could find their way. Now he is getting cease and desist letters from the NY and San Francisco transit systems. Keep in mind, although he accepts donations on his page he does not charge for the maps. Find out more at:

http://www.ipodsubwaymaps.com/

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www.urbancartography.com

2005-03-22T04:25:06Z

New collaborative weblog on cartography & planning issues looking for co-authors, editorial content (software & book reviews, essays, short notes, etc.).

http://www.urbancartography.com

posted in Cartographie - 3 replies

Obit: Arthur Robinson

2004-11-16T03:06:02Z

Cartographer Solved the 'Greenland Problem'

Arthur Robinson, who died Oct. 10 at the age of 89, is best known for the "Robinson projection." It was a solution to the "Greenland problem," an age-old cartographers' bugaboo wherein Greenland looks disproportionately large on maps drawn to the most familiar Mercator projection. NPR's Melissa Block talks with Joel Morrison, one of Robinson's former students.

http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4171116

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TNT vs. ESRI

2004-11-09T19:28:14Z

Anybody experiences comparing ESRI with TNT lite. TNT lite is free but before I start reading 130Mb of Manual/Tutorial I'd like to know it it's worth it.
cheers
Axel

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ESRI on CBS election night

2004-11-04T06:09:33Z

..discuss.

Just kidding. How is everybody? Wow, what a quiet tribe this has been. Anyone check out the election map on CBS during election night? Global GIS dominator, ESRI, was at it again - on the tube this time. The thing actually worked! The map did not hang, no restarts, no segmentation violations!! But what I'd really like to know is what people thought of the efficacy of such a tool, the overall design, and the interactivity as a future element in map production.

Ok, now discuss.

rafa

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Peter's Map

2004-05-04T04:54:33Z

What do you all think about the projection known as Perter's map, whereby he has mapped the world onto a flat grid of longitudes/lattitudes:
www.newint.org/issue123/flat.htm

It seems an interesting perspective and as - if not more - accurate than projections usually seen on world maps! Interesting ramifications and pondering when compared to the control of the Developed nations over the others..

posted in Cartographie - 8 replies

Searching for Resumes/CVs

2004-04-24T01:46:07Z

Hi,

I work for a small but rapidly expanding GIS firm in DC. We're looking for mid range SDE (Oracle or SQL Server0 and ArcObject developers...

if anyone knows anyone that would be interested in these positions have them send me their resumes. Thanks

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Constructing cartograms

2004-04-20T12:43:44Z

Someone on another tribe was asking me how to construct cartograms manually. I am copying the post onto this tribe in case someone finds it of use.

You will need graph paper, pencils, erasers, and whatever manual drafting materials you think appropriate.

I will try to simplify the process as much as possible so remember there are several ways to make a cartogram and there are several types of cartograms (contiguous, non-contiguous, single, and two variable, etc.).

1. Consider what is the total area the map will cover
2. Determine what level your enumeration unit will be. This is usually determined by how the data was captured and recorded.
3. Consider the proportion of total that each enumeration has as the size of each enumeration will depend on this.
4. Determine if you map is best served as a contiguous cartogram or non-contiguous cartogram. In other words, do you want to maintain spatial proximity of the total area or do you want to "space" out the enumeration units.
5. Decide as to what degree you can and want to preserve the original shape of the enumeration units.
6. There are several ways to address these issues so you may want to review other atlases, etc. Also, look back too much older cartograms, as there are some beautiful constructions that are no longer being produced thanks to GIS.
7. Now, organize your data into 3 or 5 divisions or ranking classification.
8. From this structure determine a good "counting-unit" for your data. A good way to approach this is to take your largest enumeration unit (that is the one that will be the largest distortion) and take the graph paper and draw that largest unit onto the paper. But be warned you have to visualize how the other units may fit on the page. Once you have done this it will give you a good idea of how many grid squares lie within the border of the enumeration unit. You must also approximate the area within grid squares that are bisected by the border to come up with a total "counting-unit" for that enumeration unit.
9. Now make a chart of your data breaking up the raw data into "counting-units"
10. You can now start drawing your map based on these sizes.
11. I find it easier working with the larger enumerations first and then filling the in-between places with the smaller enumeration units but you have to be able to visualize the data. Most people probably build on each previous constructed enumeration unit to preserve border shapes. This is good too just remember what you imagine your total map to look like.
12. So, you begin to have what looks like a cartogram . . . don't forget to include a key on your map (perhaps a block of the counting unit or several) this should match those data divisions or ranking classification that you previously determined.
13. If there is an enumeration unit where the data equals 0 or is significantly smaller than the other units, I would recommend leaving it out of the cartogram but placing a notation at the bottom of your map. Otherwise, map-readers may think it was an error and that you omitted something that should be there.
14. After you have drawn your cartogram you may want to scan it into a graphics program and then edit it and add text etc. Be sure to scan your key at the same time and ALWAYS include your key in any enlargements or reductions of the map so that it retains accuracy.

I am working on an article that explains combining both manual and computer methods in making cartograms. I will post it whenever I get it done but the paying jobs of course have priority. I hope these short, quick, and dirty instructions are useful and if you have any questions you can send them to michael@cartographic.net.

Cartogram example: http://www.cartographic.net/graphics/maps/pages/armedforcescartogram_jpg.htm

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New Zeland

2004-03-13T15:05:28Z

New Zeland is merely a conspiracy of cartographers.

posted in Cartographie - 1 reply

Map of the Universe !

2004-01-26T21:56:07Z

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~mjuric/universe/

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Photographic map of London

2004-01-19T23:30:19Z

http://www.euboia.org

posted in Cartographie - 2 replies

3D Digital Panorama of Spirit's Landing

2004-01-16T13:58:12Z

Check out the cool 3D image of Spirit's Mars landing zone. It is available at:

www.3dworld.com

* note you will have to dig out a pair of 3d glasses from your bottom drawer

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Another project from Marcos Weskamp

2004-01-12T23:14:53Z

Habitat Perspective
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/perspectives/

Article from SmartMobs
http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/002401.html

Marcos Weskamp is developing a Web-based application that tracks volunteer participants in their movements about a city (Tokyo). As he describes it:

Habitat perspectives is an online instalation that atempts to visualize spatio-temporaly the places we inhabit. Through GPS-capable mobile phones, participants will be posting geocoded images to an online shared space which starts as a black canvas. As participants post more and more content, a map of the city, and the map of each of the participants "places" will slowly start emerging.

One of ther reasons why Tokyo is such a mess as a city is that it is a tangled mess of intertwining main streets intersected and crisscrossed by back alleys and side streets. Specially when you don't own a car, and you mainly travel by subway as most other citizens, one of the biggest problems you get in such a place is that you never get to mentally visualize the relationship among all the places you usually hang out at. You only know about "islands" in the city; you get in the subway in Shinjuku island, you pop-up in Shibuya island. The more you move around those spaces you'll slowly start turning them into neighborhoods, along with your own personal networks of places. If you asked a group of people to draw you a map of the city, you'll notice that all of them will be inevitably different - each of them will have their own particular perspective of their habitat.

Marcos is recruiting participants for this work-in-progress.

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Social Circles - Mailing List Social Visualization

2004-01-12T23:06:53Z

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/socialcircles/

Application to makes links between people involved in mailling list visible. It is possible to contact Marcos Weskamp in order to have an Newsgroup mapped
other interesting maps on Marcos Weskamp's web site
http://marcosweskamp.marumushi.com/

concept
Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address. When subscribing to a mailing you never know who the principals are, how many people are listening or what subjects they are talking about. It's like entering a meeting room with plenty of people in the darkness and then having to learn who is who by just listening to their voices.
Social Circles does not pretend to be a statistical application, but rather aims to raise the lights in that room just enough to let you enhance your perception of what’s happening. At a glance it allows an easy way of grasping the whole situation by highlighting who is participating, who is "visually" central to that group, and displaying the topics everyone is talking about. How does the list structure itself? Is it moderated? Is it chaotic?

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Nodes Garden

2003-12-01T13:29:15Z

http://levitated.net/bones/nodeGarden/index.html

and several Jave Applets to simulate network growth.

http://levitated.net/daily/levBinaryNetworkv1.html
http://levitated.net/daily/levBinaryNetworkv2.html
http://levitated.net/daily/levBinaryNetworkv3.html
http://levitated.net/daily/levBinaryNetworkv4.html

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3D Map of communities (Hungarian project)

2003-11-25T11:37:13Z

http://www.pezo.net/daniel/

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Mark Lombardi drawings

2003-11-25T11:35:50Z

http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html

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Huminity

2003-11-10T09:30:48Z

http://www.huminity.com/

do you have other similar projects in mind ?

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publier vos URL ici

2003-09-11T11:00:02Z

posted in Cartographie - 1 reply

cartographie et Amazon

2003-09-11T10:57:36Z

petite Applet Java permettant de naviger dans la bases d'Amazon et faisant apparaitre les proximité entre des référence de disques ou de livres...
http://www.pmbrowser.info/amazon.html

on ne retrouve tjrs pas le plaisir de butinner dans une librairie...

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