< To learn more about controversy studies
> Exemplary public resources in science and humanities
EPVote Tracking the Votes of the European Union Parliament
http://www.epvote.eu
Type: Web-tool
Status: Public
Source: EP
Difficulty: easy
Compatibility: n/A
Language: English
EPVotes is a new data portal that aims to drastically clarify the votes of all the European Parliament Members. Conceptualized and designed within the last few weeks, and still relatively limited in its data content, "Noise in the Wires" came up with a minimal interface that summarizes the decisions of Political Groups and Committees, list the details of discussed texts, and augments geographical maps with the country-specific decision making. It seems all the data is gathered from the European Parliament website, and extracted from common Word documents. Planned for the immediate future is the inclusion of political profile of each Member of the European Parliament based on their votes (e.g. in favour / against alternative energies, immigration...).
Life24 picture mosaic world view
http://art.joeyvandijk.nl/application.php?tp=1
Type: Website
Status: Public
Source: Joey Van Dijk
Difficulty: easy
Compatibility: n/A
Language: English
Life24 is a geographical map that conceptually represents "world awareness", by visualizing various visual information sources to their origin on a world map. The online sources are parsed to create a world map of (webcam) images & various news feeds. this world map is mapped on a grid of 24 vertical slots by 15 horizontal slots. the 24 vertical slots provide a visual interpretation of the 24 hours, whilst the 15 horizontal slots are (still?) arbitrary.
Observatoire presidentielle - La blogopole
http://www.observatoire-presidentielle.fr/
Type: Web-tool
Status: Public
Source: RTGI SAS
Difficulty: need some exploration
Compatibility: Need firefox
Language: French
The site "Observatoire Présidentielle 2007" from RTGI SAS is an impressive interactive data visualization based on the political playground of the French blogosphere. The "blogopole" represents about 2000 blogs that focus on political themes, which were analysed in the context of the past 2007 French elections.
The first view allows users to select a more detailed part of the map by either a political stream or by a small, representative sample (yellow circle in the middle). the node color corresponds to its different political party. The node size represents the authority of the website, such as its Google PageRank, authority, or number of inward links. The positions of the nodes are purely topological in that the force-directed algorithm attempts to minimize the degree of overlap.
Encyclopaedia of Life
http://www.eol.org/home.html
Type: Database
Status: Public
Source: EOL
Difficulty: Easy
Compatibility: N/A
Language: English
Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth, available everywhere by single access on command. The page contains the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits. The page opens out directly or by linking to other data bases, such as ARKive, Ecoport, GenBank and MORPHOBANK. It comprises a summary of everything known about the species' genome, proteome, geographical distribution, phylogenetic position, habitat, ecological relationships and, not least, its practical importance for humanity.
The World Wide Telescope
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
Type: Website
Status: Public
Source: Microsoft Research
Difficulty: easy
Compatibility: n/A
Language: English
The World Wide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.
The University of Virginia Virtual Lab
http://www.virlab.virginia.edu/FS/home.htm
Type: Website
Status: Public
Source: University of Virginia
Difficulty:
Compatibility:
Language: English
The University of Virginia's "Virtual Science Lab" uses leading-edge visualization software to depict science and technology affecting our daily lives. This software allows us to climb inside objects, to see fields and forces, or to zoom in on things as tiny as atoms or electrons.
Photosynth
Application: http://photosynth.net
Presentation: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Type: Software Application
Status: Freeware
Source: Blaise Aguera y Arcas et al. Microsoft
Difficulty: Unknown
Compatibility: PC.
Language: English
Blaise also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or "fly" in for a (much) closer look.
Many eyes
For shared visualization and discovery
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
Type: Web-tool
Status: Freeware
Source: alphaworks, IBM
Difficulty: Unknown
Compatibility: N/A, Java plugin required
Language: English
"Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis...
We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways."
Synoptic
Meteorological Data Visualization
http://synoptic.weaintplastic.com
Type: Web-tool
Status: Public
Source: weaintplastic.com
Difficulty: easy
Compatibility: n/A
Language: English/German
Synoptic [weaintplastic.com] is a 3D "interactive infographic" based on the chronological sequence of back-dated meteorological data from Augsburg (Germany). Users can select a data attribute to explore (e.g. temperature, luminosity, humidity, air pressure, precipitation), alter timespans, and detect outliers, trends or patterns over time on a three-dimensional line graph landscape.
