VISUALIZATIONS
By Royal Van Horn
Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche
FOR SOME TIME now, I have followed the work of Edward Tufte of Yale University. Among his many books and publications, my favorites are The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and the somewhat less technical Visual Explanations. I heartily recommend the latter. In the introduction to Visual Explanations, Tufte writes, "Assessments of change, dynamics, and cause and effect are at the heart of thinking and explanations. This book describes strategies -- the proper arrangement in space and time of images, words, numbers -- for presenting information."1 This column is a sampler of the kinds of visual explanations or visualizations that are becoming increasingly available on the Internet. Incidentally, Tufte has an online discussion forum on his website (www.edwardtufte.com).
A few days ago, I stumbled onto the most incredible website, The Atlas of Cyberspaces. Here is an introduction from the site's main page:
Welcome to the Atlas of Cyberspaces. This is an atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web, and other emerging Cyberspaces. These maps of Cyberspaces -- cybermaps -- help us visualise and comprehend the new digital landscapes beyond our computer screen, in the wires of the global communications networks and vast online information resources. The cybermaps, like maps of the real world, help us navigate the new information landscapes, as well being objects of aesthetic interest. They have been created by "cyber-explorers" of many different disciplines and from all corners of the world.
Some of the maps you will see in the Atlas of Cyberspaces will appear familiar, using the cartographic conventions of real-world maps; however, many of the maps are much more abstract representations of electronic spaces, using new metrics and grids.1
The site has maps, visual representations, images, interactive 3-D panoramas, and video animations organized under such headings as Conceptual, Artistic, Geographic, Topology, Info Spaces, ISP maps, and so on. I was so fascinated by the site and its stunning visuals that I spent several hours browsing its contents. (Of course, I should have been writing this column.) In the Artistic area of the site, I found a fascinating 12-minute QuickTime movie titled "Warriors of the Net" (www.warriorsofthe.net). This animated movie explains visually how IP packets travel around the Internet. It also explains routers, switches, firewalls, LANS, WANS, addressing, proxy servers, virtual ports, and so on. If you have ever wondered about IP networks or if you would like to see an example of "visualization" in action, this movie is for you. Because it is an animated feature, even intermediate-grade students will be able to understand it.
The Atlas of Cyberspaces site offers a wide variety of more traditional maps of such things as satellite and overseas Internet connections. I was interested to learn that Internet traffic from Florida usually travels to New York before it goes to Europe. Other maps offer either a micro or macro view of the Internet. You can see the Internet's main pipes and connectors, or you can look at the density of wireless Ethernet nodes in major cities. I was fascinated when I compared maps of the Qwest and AT&T IP backbones in the U.S. Unless you understand what's displayed in these Cyber-Atlas materials, you cannot fully understand the complexity and pervasiveness of cyberspace technology.
While we're on the topic of cartography, a new search engine (www.kartoo.com) helps you visualize the results of your search. Search results are displayed in a map-style graphic, with hits appearing as balls of various sizes on a map-like background. Larger balls signify more relevant sites. Move the mouse over a ball, and a summary of the site appears to the left of the screen. These summaries are a lot more readable than those produced by other search engines. Moving the mouse over the graphical links or "roads" between the displayed sites brings up a + / - window. Click on the minus sign, and the search engine eliminates pages that are similar. Click on the plus icon, and the search engine adds similar sites. A right arrow button takes you to the next page/map of the results of your search.
It is difficult to describe in words exactly how Kartoo's cartographic interface works, so I suggest you try it out yourself. I don't plan to stop using Google or Metacrawler, but I do think Kartoo would be useful as a way to help students understand the Web and the way search engines work.
One of the most widely used visualization tools is QuickTime. QuickTime has the built-in ability to display either 360-degree panoramas, which allow the viewer to be on the inside of a scene, or objects that the viewer is able to "walk around," such as a car or a building. To make QuickTime 360 images, you need a special camera tripod head, but these are available for about $100 from www.kaidan.com. You also need "stitching software," which lets you piece together photographs to make a 360-degree image. There is an example of a QuickTime 360 or panorama of a first-grade classroom on my website (www.electronicscholar.com/pano.html). Using the mouse, you can wander around the classroom. There are a lot of QuickTime panoramas on the Web. There's even one of Galileo's home and lab. If you are searching for such material, use the search term "panorama."
Unfortunately, searching the Web for visualizations is difficult for several reasons. For one, "visualization" is a term more widely used in computer science and the natural sciences than in other disciplines. Thus the term is too general to be of much use in a Web search. For example, the Google search of "visualization and QuickTime and science" yields 4,820 results. Searching on "QuickTime and movies and science" does even worse, with about 11,000 hits.
The best results I have found in searching for visualizations have come from the search engine at www.zeal.com. Zeal is a user-generated categorical search engine whose contributors seem to be dedicated to indexing only the highest-quality and most relevant sites. I searched Zeal using the terms "QuickTime and history" and found about 100 hits, of which a dozen or so look like excellent resources. I am beginning to believe that search engines like Google, which use automated "crawlers" or "bots" to index every site on the Web, are starting to outlive their usefulness. Is it really necessary to search three billion pages to find visualizations that could be used in ninth-grade biology class?
The Visible Earth website (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov) of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is a great resource for teachers of science or geography. You might think that the site would have only high-altitude and satellite imagery. Not so. For example, the site has an animated clip of the desert drying out on a sunny day. Being a fisherman, I was intrigued by a sea-height diagram demonstrating the effect of the Gulf Stream and other ocean phenomena on the East Coast. The explanations that accompany the visualizations at this site are clear, concise, and educational.
One of the most valuable educational websites for all teachers is the Public Broadcasting Service's American Field Guide website (www.pbs.org/americanfieldguide/index.html). Pulling from its vast library of educational materials, a PBS affiliate in Oregon created this invaluable site with hundreds of digital videos that every educator should know about. The name "Field Guide" is a little misleading, since the site is not exclusively a site for naturalists. For example, it has a major subsection on Human History, which is further divided into headings for Archeology, Economic Use of Nature, Exploration and Settlement, Folklore/Legend, and Native Peoples. If I were rating websites, I'd give this one 6 stars out of 5!
Speaking of history, the University of Virginia has three major resources: the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities (www.iath.virginia.edu); the Valley of the Shadow (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2); and the Virginia Center for Digital History (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vcdh). Of these three separate but cooperating projects, the Valley of the Shadow site is probably the most mature and valuable. This site focuses on the Civil War era and has such a huge library of resources that it is difficult to describe. Using historical records and "geographical information system" software, the creators of the site have generated an array of visualizations of where people lived, where famous battles were fought, and even who attended which church in a rural village. There are also huge collections of artifacts, such as a collection of advertisements and posters announcing slave auctions. Together, these three sites offer a large number of links to similar sites around the world. This a very good starting point on the Web for any humanities teacher.
Many of the visual displays that people watch today contain "windows," an innovation originally conceived at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). As you might guess, PARC continues to do such work and has recently released a new Web browser called "Popout Prism." This browser allows users to enter keywords in a panel on the left side of the browser window. Then, when the user goes to a website, holding down the mouse button makes all those keywords in the document pop out as enlarged and colored transparent type. PARC research suggests that using Popout Prism decreases by 29% the time it takes to find answers on the Web. PARC spins off its technology to a company called Alpha Avenue (www.alphaAve.com). You can find Popout Prism there, along with several other interesting innovations like a collaboration tool called Sparrow Web that lets a group or community of people design Web pages jointly without knowing html. Popout Prism is available only in a Windows version, so being a Mac user, I could not give it a test run.
Before I began writing this column, I did a Google search on "information literacy." (I'll try to write a column entirely on this topic in the near future.) Near the top of the results page was a University of Texas site containing a Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (http://tilt.lib.utsystem.edu). This is an excellent tutorial for students of nearly any age. It covers four main topics: common misconceptions about the Internet, information sources and how to choose one, effective search techniques, and assessing the credibility of a source. I spent about 15 minutes in one of the tutorial's modules and refreshed my memory of how the various parts of a Library of Congress catalog number refer to a work. Did you know that one part of an LC number catalogs a holding by a discipline code, such as sociology? The tutorial is available in two versions, one in straight html and the other in Flash. I worked with the html version, though I suspect that the Flash version has much neater graphics that would appeal to students.
With the emergence of readily available visualizations, it will soon be impossible for anyone to tolerate stark lecturing as a teaching technique. We will experience a new "instructional divide" between those who teach with visual explanations and those who do not.
1. Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations
(Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1997), p. 9.
2. The Atlas of Cyberspaces website (www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/atlas/atlas.html) is maintained by Martin Dodge, Cyber-Geography Research, Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College, London.
ROYAL VAN HORN is a professor
of education at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville
(e-mail: rvanhorn@unf.edu).
