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.