Visualizing video archive content -- arte.tv

Okay, first at all, it's been a while that I have written a blog post here. I guess that's some tribute to the ever faster spinning world of digital media as I had concentrated more on shorter and therefore, faster means of communication such as twitter and (shame on me...) facebook. Nevertheless, while skipping through the pages of moresemantic I decided to revive the blog and to keep on posting about current research work....

This morning, I had to look up a documentary 'The Digital Bomb', which had been broadcasted yesterday evening on the German/French arte television channel. Arte is one of the public service television channels focussing on culture and arts. As many other television broadcasters, arte of course maintains a website and being as a television broadcaster there is also some sort of media archive. As being a public service television broadcaster, some strange regulations keep the archive from maintaining more than 7 days of tv-program -- but this is something completely different (as to speak with Monty Python). This morning, I made some discoveries in arte's tv archive, esp. about their way of visualizing content.

Besides being a little bit difficult to find the right mode of access -- esp. if you are looking for a specific date of broadcast, I succeeded in finding this nice portal page showing the most featured videos of yesterday's tv program including a timeline (at the top) for growing back (and forth) in time. I really like the 2-D tile pattern relating the size of the videos (represented by some significant key frame) to their popularity (or any other ranking). When you place the mouse pointer over a frame you will get more detailed information about the video and by clicking on it the video opens for reviewing.

All in all it seems to be inspired by the TED video archive and there's still room for improvement. I would like to see also timelines for shown content (not only broadcast or production date) as well as geographical information about production/content shown in interactive maps.

Now I have become curious about what else is out there? Any new innovative, interactive visualizations for displaying video archive content aside from the youtube mainstream??

Visualization of large document data sets

Of course, there are a lot of books at amazon. To find a specific book, you have several possibilities. Either you try the 'search'-frame (be careful to write your keywords in the correct way as they do appear e.g. in the title) or you try to follow the categories and the proposed selections (Top10 lists, etc.) of books there. A great feature of course is the similarity based search or the search based on recommendations. This is the only way to discover something new by serendipity, something you did'nt even know to exist . In real life this way to find a book comes equal to finding by recommendation of friends or by your local librarian or book seller.

But, what about good old window-shopping. If I come to a bookstore or to a library, I love to wander around the book shelves and to look here and there and to spend (sometimes to waist...) lots of time.

Something that comes visually close to this experience is zoomii.com. It's an amazon add-on for browsing (a considerably large set of) books (they say its about 20.000 books right now) with the look and feel of book shelves, ordered by categories, with (right sized) book covers in the shelves. You can walk around, zoom in and out, and of course you can browse by categorie or search via keyword.

It's really some nice way to visualize large sets of documents. I would like to see an API for visualizing documents on the web that way!!

[via netbib.log]

to boldly go....

For sure, there are a lot of nice little visualisation tools for flickr and even more has been written about tagging, folksonomies, and web 2.0 search (including the 'flickr!' article in this blog...). Nevertheless, I found a new flash-based application for flickr tag / search visualisation that is worth while taking a look: The Tag Galaxy.

Tag Galaxy visualises the search process in a bold star trek manner. Your search keywords (tags) are shown in a central star/planet with related tags spinning around it. you can refine your search by clicking on one of the small tag planets. This is only a one step ahead search...why not showing related tags of related tags....with according interrelationships...? Sounds weird? Should be worth a shot. Clicking on the central star/planet guides you to another view, where the search results (images) are shown on an animated globe. Really neat....and interesting what comes out if people have enough time to play around with flash ;-)

Anyway, the trouble with neat search visualisations often is that the visualisation is nice to look at but it gets boring after a few tries. Real good visualisation gives you more information than without the visualisation. Only if its worth while, you will keep on using it. Just think of Google Maps. Your search related with geographical information always improves your search results...and thus you will also use it next time....

Liquid Browsing - a new paradigm for accessing huge collections of data ?!

As promissed yesterday, I've installed iverse's liquidfile, a kind of substitute (or supplement) for the mac finder. (For all those mac illiterates: the finder is some kind of file system browser). Liquidfile applies the principle of liquid browsing to the filesystem of your computer. To get a short overview, how liquid browsing works, just take a look at the following short movie presentations [1] [2]. It's rather difficult to describe the way how it works with words, because its a visual way of browsing...and thus it is better explained in a visual way also. It's a 2 dimensional visualization, where e.g. the x-axis represents a timeline (as e.g. file creation date) and the y-axis represents all files in an alphabetical order. Then, every file is put on that grid and denoted with a bubble. The size of the bubble (which itself is semi-transparent) reflects the size of the file. The nice thing in general about liquid browsing is that you are able to visualize huge amount of data also on small displays. In that case the mouse pointer acts as some kind of magnifying glass.

As for the file system on your computer, this kind of visualizations has some advantages. First, you can dissolve the entire directory structure (if you want) and look at all files at once (on my computer this were more than 15.000 files). You have the possibility to combine complex (realtime) filtering with several selection mechanisms to find the files you are looking for. Simultaneously, the order in which the files are presented in general stays always the same and does not change. Thus, your visual memory will always be able to memorize the approximate position of a distinct file that you are looking for.
Of course the system has several drawbacks (at least now). My macBook is rather new (january 2007). Thus, almost all of my files have the same creation date (most of them were simply copied to the macBook on the very same day....). Therefore, the time axis will work best, if you start to work with your computer and they will be created/changed over the time.
Another drawback is the limitation of the axes to represent only filenames, filesizes, or creation/change dates. I would like to order files also according to other (also content based) criterias to get a better overview.

But, it's a nice appetizer anyway. What I would like to try out is to visualize relationships between entities (files/documents) with this technique. Just imagine bubbles of different entities and if I focus on one, all other bubbles that represent entities, which are in a certain relationship to the entity being in focus will highlight or move closer (of course in realtime...).