Pearltrees: a place to store and collect you stuff
"Pearltrees lets you keep at hand the web pages you like, discover some new ones in your areas of interest and share them easily with your friends."
(Pearltrees)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
PaperScope: a tool for graphically representing reference and citation chains
"PaperScope is a tool for graphically exploring the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) which is a database of published astrophysics papers. PaperScope is extremely useful for identifying the citation/reference relationships between papers, and enables the user to visualize these relationships to make locating papers of interest easier. Use it for constructing reference or citation chains, as well as identifying common references/citations between several key papers. It is a tool designed to simplify the process of searching for relevant papers to an astrophysics researcher whether they be a professor, post doc, or student."
(Mark Holliman, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Visualising The Structure Of The World Wide Web In 3D Hyperbolic Space
Tamara Munzner and Paul Burchard (1995)
We visualise the structure of sections of the World Wide Web by constructing graphical representations in 3D hyperbolic space. The felicitous property that hyperbolic space has "more room" than Euclidean space allows more information to be seen amid less clutter, and motion by hyperbolic isometries provides for mathematically elegant navigation. The 3D graphical representations, available in the WebOOGL or VRML file formats, contain link anchors which point to the original pages on the Web itself. We use the Geomview/WebOOGL 3D Web browser as an interface between the 3D representation and the actual documents on the Web. The Web is just one example of a hierarchical tree structure with links "back up the tree" i.e. a directed graph which contains cycles. Our information visualisation techniques are appropriate for other types of directed graphs with cycles, such as filesystems with symbolic links.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
They Rule: power-broker connections
"I wanted to explore ideas about information visualisation, the Internet as a social construction as well as reveal an aspect of the relationships of the ruling class. Hopefully that process of revealing the connections is fascinating as well as provocative. I am still excited by the potential of the Internet, but the fruits of this socially produced network are still controlled by private hands. The potential is revealed every-day; Napster, Lexus Nexus, etc. but it is always held back by private interest. Anybody should be able to search for any image, or published work and locate it and view it or listen to it. We have the technology, we just need a social structure that can keep up with it.In They Rule I wanted to exploit the social nature of the Internet. The first thing that most Internet connected computer users do when they turn on their computers is check their email. The Internet has millions of potential social relations that can be formed, yet the formats for these communications has only just begun to develop. Designers of the communication channels on the Internet can affect the form that those relationships take. I could make a chatroom where swearwords are prohibited, or only the letter e could be typed, or only the person who had been in there the longest was able to type, or a chatroom in which everyone had to type in order to stay there, the possibilities are endless. Some formats will enable large-scale participatory debate, and other formats may be better suited for one to one personal communication. Companies are looking to shape these relations in specific ways, they see the relations in terms of customer and retailer, business to business, advertiser to consumer, advertiser to game player, advertiser to reader, etc. etc. The tools they build reflect the specific needs of these relationships. Therefore, much of the innovation on the Internet has come not from the commercial sector, despite their hype, but rather groups of people who have wanted to forge relationships other than those normally practiced in the commercial arena."
(Josh On: UnPlugged 2002)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
