The reMap interface we used to visualize visualcomplexity projects can be applied to many other collections. In fact the conditions are:

- to be a list of contents (more than 80)
- each content is tagged
- contents share tags
- each content has an associated image (or it is an image)

Therefore image collections and in particular photography collections are ideal sets of contents to be displayed using this interactive method. Our aim is to open the app to be freely used with any content set that observes the conditions. Off course Flickr and its sets is a big resource (but there are much more). In order to be informed about please follow Bestiario´s blog and twitter account.

By now we want to share three photography collections we fell in love with: Link Tessera

- Changing New York, 1935 – 1938, Berenice Abbott, from the New York Public Library’s photostream open

- Chicks, by merkley open

- Proyecto agua (water project), Antonio Guillén and students from the Instituto Batalla de Clavijo open

The Natural Science Museum of Barcelona Data Base contains 50.000 records so far collected along one century. Most of the register are mollusc, vertebrata and artropodes. They belong to places all .over the world. The Data Base will be updated until reaching the total amount of collections registered (around the million).

The information is structured following the Darwin Core Standard, developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF (for whom museum is one of the information providers).

Bestiario developed this interactive space that allows acces to the records collections in the Museum Data Base.

The interactive options are:
-drag and zoom the map to selected geographical location and scale
-select/deselect geographical layers in order to have different views
-click on an active (containing registers) square to download all the registers located in the selected area.
-a zoom-in framing the selected square will display more detailed locations (with a depicted precision radius) of the registers. Zoom into selected square is activated by clicking arrows in corners.

link map project
link treemap project

Yesterday (17.12.2009), the Education Minister, Mr Angel Gabilondo, and the Scretary of State, Ms Eva Almunia, presented Cosmolema at the Ministry’s headquarters. Cosmolema is a new application developed by Bestiario and it makes part of a new set of tools with which Escuela 2.0 is being equipped. In Ms Almunia’s words, “Cosmolema is the Ministery’s Chrismas gift to the pulpits”. This event was attended by Juan Aguado public school’s (Torre de Esteban Hambran, Toledo) pupils as well as the school’s head teacher and director, Ms Eva Garrido.

In its first version, Cosmolema, a complete lexicon of the Castilian language (730.000 words and over 10.000.000 interrelation) was used and the focus is on alphabetic relations of words. Alphabetic relations are those which arise by word transformation: addition, subtraction and change on the way letters are ordered in word. For instance, the words paro (a first person conjugation of the verb to stop) and ropa (clothes) are related because they are made out of the same letters ordered in a different way (this is known as an anagram).

Cosmolema has two main environments: exploration and games. The application allows navigating the Castilian language through these relations, thus promoting the discovery of its combinatory and generative richness. This allows the user to experience the tension and forces that give rise and transform our language, as well as giving him access to a huge vocabulary source.

Canvi & temps are two network browsing spaces built from a compilation of articles, pages, persons and links, all related with complexity in science. The research was carried out by Pau Alsina, Josep Perelló, Michele Catanzaro, Pere Monràs, Carles Tardío, Oriol Vallès, Irma Vilà and Santiago Ortiz. The project is in display at Arts Santa Mónica, in the context of a Cultures of Change exhibit.

This historical (it includes citations since 1927) and transversal (it contains more than 30 categories of fields of knowledge) research offers and ample vision of the collection of aproaches, strategies and tactics, reseach methods and interests known as complexity science. Canvi & Temps offer two different ways of experiencing the contents of the network and its interrelations. The main structure of the data base is a partition generated by contents and tags. Departing from the existing relations between contents and tags this gives rise to new relations amongst the contents. The resulting network highlights interesting relations and possible paths within the contents.

Temps
The interest in representing changes associated with complexity science through time (from 1927, which is the chronological reference in the field, up to date) rose from internal dialogue within our research group. Temps allows to see changes on the usage intensity of the tags through time.

Canvi
Canvi branches off from Bestiario’s research mainstream on network browsing interfaces known as 6pli. It is, in essence, an interface that allows browsing a network with a local vision of a node’s surroundings and it also allows moving through the network through their relation. The uniqueness of Canvi lays in the fact that it explores new node positioning techniques as well as their spatial relations. In particular Canvi combines different techniques (geometric paradigms) subtly alternating between nodes and their relation. This means that the representation of the network is in constant movement (a breathing sort of movement), this way offering a broader perception of the local network. Canvi is a proof of concept and it is an excellent example of this experimental technique at a high degree of development.

This week Jose and Cristóbal installed in London’s World Travel Market an application we developed in collaboration with DDB for navigating the turistic offer of the Islas Canarias. The interface, a circular navigating tree, was disposed in nine 42″ touch screens all over the stand where visitors could access a set of videos that describes the caracteristics of each Island and choose where they want to go for holidays. The public response was excelent and the stand was awarded as the best of all!