Æliens

...

---

---

visualization

Grasping the whole is a gigantic theme, intellectual history's most important.

Ant vision is humanity's usual fate; but seeing the whole is every thinking person's aspiration.

David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds 1992

data types

• 1-D linear data -- text, source code, word index
• 2-D map data -- floor plan, office layout
• 3-D world -- molecules, schematics, ...
• temporal data -- 1 D (start, finish)
• multi-dimensional data -- n-dimensional (information) space
• tree data -- hierarchical
• network data -- graph structure

• interactive -- overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand
• storytelling -- as a paradigm for information presentation

Whatever your target audience, whatever your medium, whatever your message, you have to be convincing if not compelling.

persuasion

• a communication process in which the communicator seeks to elicit a desired response from his receiver
• a conscious attempt by one individual to change the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours of another individual or group individual through the transmission of some messages.

(re)mediation

• immediacy -- a tendency towards transparent immersion, and
• hypermediacy -- the presence of referential context

Virtual Reality won't merely replace TV. It will eat it alive.

immediacy

• epistemological: transparency, the absence of mediation
• psychological: the medium has disappeared, presence, immersion

hypermediacy

• epistemological: opacity, presence of the medium and mediation
• psychological: experience of the medium is an experience of the real

Convergence is the mutual remediation of at least three important technologies -- telephone, televison and computer -- each of which is a hybrid of technical, social and economic practice, and each of which offers its own path to immediacy.

The telephone offers the immediacy of voice or the interchange of voices in real-time.

Television is a point-of-view technology that promises immediacy through its insistent real-time monitoring of the world.

The computer's promise of immediacy comes through the combination of three-dimensional graphics, automatic (programmed) action, and an interactivity that television can not match.

As they come together, each of these is trying to absorb the others and promote its own version of immediacy.

...

---

---

convergence

(p. 27) ... merging previously disparate technologies of communication and representation into a single medium.

The networked computer acts like a telephone in offering one-to-one real-time communication, like a television in broadcasting moving pictures, like an auditorium in bringing groups together for lectures and discussion, like a library in offering vast amounts of textual information for reference, like a museum in its ordered presentation of visual information, like a billboard, a radio, a gameboard and even like a manuscript in its revival of scrolling text.

interactive

• procedural -- 'programmed media' ...
• participatory -- offering agency

...

---

---

immersive

• spatial -- explorable in (state) space
• encyclopedic -- with (partial) information closure

multimedia authoring

• narrative format
• procedural authorship