Design Issues article published

My article for the journal Design Issues is now out.

The article discusses issues in the mapping of historical time to a graphical surface, focusing on the orientation of the time axis.

It contrasts the lack of intellectual debate on mapping time with the rich controversies over competing geographic projections. It is a step in the process of generating debate in relation to chronographics, and proposes a research agenda.

The article combines a synthesis of the literatures of cognitive science and gesture studies with original archival research.

1. The first reveals that the metaphorical direction of time differs between verbal and gestural usage, and to a lesser extent between cultures. There is no "right" direction for time in graphics. 
2. The second reports on my original investigations into the emergence of modern chronographics in the mid-eighteenth century when there was a shift from typographic, tabular layouts to truly graphical time-maps based on a changing model of time spawned by Descartes and Newton. Here, research into the timelines of Oresme (1350s) and Barbeu-Dubourg and Priestley (1750s) highlights for the first time their difficulties in finding the "right" direction for time.

The article is: Boyd Davis, Stephen (2012) History on the Line: time as dimension. Design Issues, 28 (4). pp. 4-17. ISSN 0747-9360.

At the moment it is downloadable free. The direct link to the PDF (7.4MB) is here: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00171.

Project blog launched

Florian's studentship on the visualisation of cultural data is going well.

He has launched a blog (called YYYY-MM-DD) of thoughts, articles and findings on the subject of time, cultural data and interactive visualisations which already offers some interesting articles.

Find it here: http://research.kraeutli.com/index.php/author/florian/

Kerouac - On the Scroll

I did not know until I got my regular newsletter from the British Library just now, that Jack Kerouac wrote his On The Road on sheets of paper that he taped together in a continuous sequence.
The Library says:

Written over a period of three weeks in April 1951 in manic bursts of what Allen Ginsberg referred to as ‘spontaneous bop prosody’, Jack Kerouac typed the manuscript on rolls of tracing paper, which he taped together into a long scroll to avoid replacing paper at the end of the page and interrupting his creative flow.

We are delighted to welcome the 120-foot-long scroll to London for the first time. It will be on display in a specially-constructed case, alongside sound and printed materials from the Library’s collection.

As the tale itself, I believe, tends to the serial (ashamed to say I have not read it), the scroll is a nice model of that temporal linearity.
According to Wikipedia, the scroll was bought in 2001 by Jim Irsay (Indianapolis Colts football team owner) for 2.43 million US dollars.

On the Road: Jack Kerouac's manuscript scroll is open until Thursday 27 December 2012.

Information on the British Library site.

Studentship begins

Today at last I am glad to say that the PhD funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network has begun!

Florian Kräutli (seen below winning a design prize in 2009), has previously studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven and most recently on the MSc Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. He will investigate - through a series of practical projects - the visualisation of cultural data, with special emphasis on visualisations over time.

Florian Kräutli (right), now PhD student, presented with a design prize by Swiss minister of Home Affairs Pascal Couchepin in 2009.

There will shortly be a blog for the project with regular links to the Chronographics blog you are reading now.

The commercial partner is System Simulation, a software house with unrivalled experience of creating tools to manage and present cultural and other datasets. Their clients include the British Museum, the London Transport Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Getty Images, SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network) and Culture24.

Florian's personal page
System Simulation company page

Guy Königstein's Family Stories

Guy Königstein's "Family Stories" is a stop motion film about family history, in which the family members are represented by unwinding spools of thread. The spools roll through their lives, changing direction when they move away or back home, crossing life lines of others, joining them for a while and sometimes separating from each other again.

There's something appealing about the physical qualities of the imagery so that each spool seems to be animated by the spirit of the person it represents. The understated narration, I assume in Guy's own voice, is poignant at times.

"He eventually found out that she been transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and that he would never see her again."

Guy's Family Stories: 1. Moving Family on Vimeo
Guy's page for Family Stories



 

Creationism at the Causeway 2 - NT reconsiders

The response to my complaint to the National Trust was a request that I take the issue up with the Trust's Northern Ireland office, which I duly did. I got a prompt reply which suggests that a welcome change may be in prospect.

Thank you for getting in touch about the new Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre.

We have been receiving a large number of views via email and social media expressing concern that the Trust is somehow endorsing or promoting creationism in our new interpretation at the Giant’s Causeway.

Our new exhibition and outdoor audio guide clearly set out the science of the Causeway’s formation and shaping - that the Causeway is around 60 million years old.

There is one small exhibit in the visitor centre which briefly references creationism. It was our intention to present this view in the context of an historical debate about the age of the Earth.

However we recognise that many people have written to us concerned that the wording of the exhibit suggests that there is an ongoing debate in science about the formation of the Causeway - we are trying to listen to these views and take account of them. The National Trust is very clear that there is no debate in science.

The Trust’s approach is focussed on our visitors and members. We always try to respond to their feedback about how we present information and stories where we can. We have therefore decided to review the interpretative materials in this small section of the Visitor Centre.

You can find out more about this here:
http://ntpressoffice.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/giants-causeway-visitor-centre-interpretation-statement/

We hope this addresses your concerns. 

I wrote to thank them for taking the criticism seriously. Let's hope they actually make the change without being nobbled by the fundamentalist lobby again.

Creationism at the Causeway

Sadly, the National Trust, the UK's guardian of buildings and sites of past and present value, has embraced Creationism. I mention it here since I have previously posted on the irony that attempts to make diagrams of all of time were undermined almost as soon as they were invented in the 1750s by the realisation at the end of the eighteenth century that "all of time" was very, very much longer than the pioneer chronographers had supposed.

God amuses himself with making geometric rocks

I have been a member of the National Trust for many years. I have never written before to complain about information given by the Trust at its properties, but I wrote to them today to explain that I was very unhappy about press reports of their treating Creationism seriously in their information at the Giant's Causeway. Although it seems they have tried to cope gracefully with lobbying from religious fundamentalists, they have effectively handed them just the kind of victory these people seek.

The Trust is reported as saying "this debate continues today and we reflect and respect the fact that creationists today have a different perspective on the age of the Earth from that of mainstream science."
The Trust has no business according "respect" to a benighted superstition. It is silly to accord a position based solely on faith the status of a position in a "debate".

The phrase "a different perspective ... from that of mainstream science" will be read as implying that Creationism has some legitimate claim to be science, even if not mainstream, whereas it has no right to be considered as science in any shape or form. Science is based on evidence, and Creationism is based on faith – these are radically different.

This terrible move by the Trust establishes a precedent, something gleefully pointed out by the Caleb Foundation on its Web page (http://www.calebfoundation.org/):

"we have worked closely with the National Trust over many months with a view to ensuring that the new Causeway Visitor Centre includes an acknowledgement both of the legitimacy of the creationist position on the origins of the unique Causeway stones and of the ongoing debate around this. We are pleased that the National Trust worked positively with us and that this has now been included at the new Visitor Centre.

[...] This is, as far as we are aware, a first for the National Trust anywhere in the UK, and it sets a precedent for others to follow.

I have asked the Trust to reconsider its decision which gives credibility to a ridiculous sect and misrepresents it has having some kind of legitimacy.

Link to the New Humanist page setting out the story.

Charlotte Christoffersen and family time

Readers of this blog will know I am fascinated by representations of Time as a straight line. This is of course just one model, often contrasted with cyclic or circular models allegedly held by, for example, Greek, Asian, or any non-Judaeo-Christian cultures. Such binary contrasts have been rejected as simplistic by Feeney (2007:3), Goody (2006: 18) and Gould (1987) respectively. In fact in any culture we seem to operate comfortably with switchable concepts of Time. In the words of Möller and Luraghi (1995:7), ‘most people perceive time in different ways according to their context or situation, with the result that any one culture is characterised by a range of different perceptions of time.’

Charlotte Christoffersen, who is graduating this year from the Innovation Design Engineering programme at the Royal College of Art, has been investigating the different models of Time used by archetypal members of a family. It is partly motivated by her interest in intra-family communication, which she suspects is made more difficult if their models of Time are not shared. She has made a number of digital tools to ‘translate’ one kind of Time to another. One of the simplest but most effective is here:

Sliders (in the foreground here) alter four aspects of the model of time displayed on the screen.

Operating one slider (controversially labelled masculinity / femininity!) transforms the working clock from a line to a circle, via all the stages in-between.

Her research for the project involved lots of interviews and observations of adults and children documented as a book and later to be available on her website.

References
Feeney, D. (2007), Caesar’s Calendar: ancient time and the beginnings of history. Berkeley: Uni. California Press.
Goody, J. (2006), The Theft of History. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gould, S.J. (1987), Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: myth and metaphor in the discovery of geological time. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Möller, A. and Luraghi, N. (1995), Time in the Writing of History: perceptions and structures. Storia della Storiografia 28. 3-15.

Arthur Buxton's visual timescapes

Arthur Buxton alerted me to his visual chronologies produced as prints.

His work employs data visualisation methods using colour extraction tools to explore trends in painting and print media. Using open source software he extracts colours from images gathered online to create charts and timelines that typically display the five most common colours in each image as a percentage.

TITLE: British Vogue Covers 1981 - 2011; YEAR: 2011; EDITION SIZE: 10; IMAGE DIMENSIONS: W 71 cm x H 37 cm;  SUBSTRATE DIMENSIONS: W 81 cm x H 48 cm;  MEDIUM: Pigmented Inkjet Print

Within this piece and its companions the small bar charts show the five most prominent colours, proportionally, in an individual Vogue cover. Each column is a year starting with September (when the fashion year starts) at the top and working down to October at the bottom. The columns run from 1981 on the right working across to 2011 on the left.

I was intrigued by Arthur's decision to map time from right to left (I have just finished an article for Design Issues about orientation and direction in mapping time). He answered,

‘It's just how the piece took shape and I was happy with the result. I'm not that attached to the right - left orientation though. Flipping it horizontally would be easy and wouldn't effect the information itself. I studied illustration BA and we were taught that in a narrative context left - right is 'adventure' and right-left is 'going home'.’  

I had not heard those metaphors for time direction before. Has anyone else? Do you have other distinctive ways of differentiating left-right and right-left flows for time?

See more Vogue-derived prints (showing how different the palette of the different national editions is) and related work by Arthur here.

Arthur is Technical Instructor / Artist in Residence at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England.

A need for chronographics

Someone posted to the Museums Computer Group:

The Wordsworth Trust wish to employ a data visualisation specialist to tell the story of the writing of Wordsworth's 9000 line poem, 'The Prelude'. It is more interesting and visual than it may sound! If anyone would like to get in touch, I'd be pleased to explain more.

The people who need this are:

The Wordsworth Trust
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Cumbria LA22 9SH
www.wordsworth.org.uk

What an ideal project for someone experienced in mapping cultural data to time!  Perhaps they will still need this when my PhD student is in place, some time this summer?

PhD studentship - Visualising cultural data - an academic-industrial partnership (London)

Revised announcement, new closing date

A PhD studentship is available at the Royal College of Art in London, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The funding includes the fees and a living allowance. This is a collaboration with industry, based at System Simulation, a research-led software engineering company in central London with a distinguished record of working with museums and other cultural organisations. The studentship provides a strong base on which to develop an industrial or academic career.


The aim of the research is to reveal new knowledge by visualising diverse large datasets in rich interactive timelines and related graphical displays. Our principal aim will be public understanding of historical and other data - making complex patterns visible at a glance - though the visualisation tools will be adaptable to advanced use by researchers, curators, historians, and others. The work presents a wealth of research problems among which the successful applicant is encouraged to identify a distinctive path.


The right applicant will have a strong desire to combine in-depth study and practical development. Your experience will include the design and development of interactive software. A software engineer may be the ideal candidate, but others with significant development experience are welcome to apply. You will be enthusiastic, and preferably knowledgeable, about visualisation and visual analytics, and have some understanding of working with large datasets. You will be committed to evaluation as well as making, since it is essential that the products of the research are usable and likeable as well as functioning to a high technical standard. See the documents online for further details...

On jobs.ac.uk:
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEG446/epsrc-funded-phd-studentship/
On RCA site:
http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=161457&GroupID=161452


Closing date 17 May 2012. Studentship to begin no later than 30 September 2012 - an earlier start is preferred.

To discuss academic / industrial aspects of the studentship, email stephen.boyd-davis@rca.ac.uk
To discuss administrative / financial aspects, email suzanne.strong@rca.ac.uk

An indication of past work by the academic director of this research can be seen here: http://rca.academia.edu/StephenBoydDavis/Papers. The Royal College of Art is a world-renowned postgraduate-only institution. In RAE2008 its research had the highest "world-leading" ranking of all submissions that combined art and design.

You may also be interested in other funded research opportunities listed at the same URL, including The AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub: Innovation and Knowledge Exchange in Digital Public Space.

On Friday 9th March 2012 I shall be talking about timelines at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon (France) as a guest of the Centre de Recherches Texte / Image / Langage.

It is part of a series on Scientific Illustration organised by Marie-Odile Bernez.

The talk is entitled ‘The Eye of History: pioneering depictions of historical time’. I shall be discussing timelines as a paradigm of the cultural shift to the visual during the eighteenth century, tracing the envy that Chronologists felt for Geography (with all its seductive and memorable visual aids), the excitement about concepts of the mechanical and of uniformity, and the mathematisation of space (in which Descartes and Newton were key figures).

Much of the material deals with French pioneering work in Chronography – not just because I am in France, but because the French really do seem to have been the first to set out time in a graphical, spatialised way and to begin to theorise its advantages.

While I am there, I shall also go to the City Library of Dijon...

...because by happy chance it is one of the two places in France that has a copy of the Explication Générale de la Mappemonde Historique by J. L. Barbeau de La Bruyère. More on that when I have seen it.

PhD studentship - Develop sophisticated digital timelines of cultural data within an academic-industrial partnership

I have funding to support a PhD student to work on state-of-the-art timelines...

A PhD studentship is available at the Royal College of Art in London, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The funding includes the fees and a living allowance. This is a collaboration with industry, based at System Simulation, a research-led software engineering company in central London with a distinguished record of working with museums and other cultural organisations. The studentship provides a strong base on which to develop an industrial or academic career.

The aim of the research is to reveal new knowledge by visualising diverse large datasets in rich interactive timelines, other chronographic formats and related graphical displays. Our principal aim will be public understanding of historical and other data - making complex patterns visible to the lay viewer at a glance - though the visualisation tools will be adaptable to advanced use by researchers, curators, historians, and others.

The right applicant will have a strong desire to combine in-depth study and practical development. Their experience will include the design and development of interactive software. A software engineer may be the ideal candidate, but others with significant development experience are welcome to apply. They will be enthusiastic (and preferably knowledgeable) about visualisation and visual analytics, and have some understanding of working with large datasets. They will be committed to evaluation as well as making, since it is essential that the products of the research are usable and likeable as well as functioning to a high technical standard. See the documents online for further details.

   http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=161457&GroupID=161452
            (scroll down to "EPSRC-funded PhD Studentship")

Closing date 28 February 2012.  Studentship to begin as soon as possible after 23 April 2012.

To discuss academic / industrial aspects of the studentship, email stephen.boyd-davis@rca.ac.uk

To discuss administrative / financial aspects, email suzanne.strong@rca.ac.uk

An indication of past work by the academic director of this research can be seen here: http://rca.academia.edu/StephenBoydDavis/Papers

You may also be interested in other funded research opportunities listed at the same URL, including The AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub: Innovation and Knowledge Exchange in Digital Public Space.

A historical timeline of financial rise and fall

Tobias Revell is a second-year student on the MA Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art (to which I moved in November 2011 since my last post to this blog).

At the recent Work in Progress exhibition, he showed a big timeline representing the vicissitudes of the world financial system from 50 to 2160 AD.

Tobias says about it

In its earliest forms, this was an exercise for myself and the studio audience in understanding the precedents and patterns of how power and finance have interacted throughout history and also as a way to show my research beyond scribbled notes. The idea being that I would then build smaller works off this context. However, I found that it came to be a piece of work in itself, a product of the research that went into it. It's also fulfilled its purpose of inspiring debate perfectly - I spent almost the whole private view talking to people about it with objections, opinions and questions of their own (in particular the assumption that as an artist/designer I was out of place in condoning rampant capitalism, something which I'm not doing nor was trying to show.)

I think that showing the research I'd done in such a graphical and open way allowed people to engage with the subject matter straight away without having to try and get to grips with curious new forms.

Timeline (detail). Tobias Revell 2012. Reproduced with permission.

Go to Tobias's blog.