Information Space Maps

These example cybermaps represent Cyberspaces as two dimensional maps. They can be seen as analogous to conventional landuse maps used in city planning. Often sophisticated information indexing and classification methods are employed to produce these maps. The aim of these maps is to provide a sense of the "lie of the land" of an information domain to aid browsing and document retrieval.

Two innovative visualisations of conversations on web-based chat boards developed by Rebecca Xiong as part of her graduate research at MIT Media Lab. The example on the left is called PeopleGarden and the one on the right is WebFan. Further details are given here: : Xiong R. and Donath J. (1999), "PeopleGarden: Creating data portraits for users", UIST.

Eastgate's Storyspace is a leading tool for writing hypertexts. It includes a number of different maps views of the hypertext structure to help the authors develop their stories.

Conversation Map, developed by Warren Sack. It is a browser designed to make it easier for participants to understand and reflect on very large-scale virtual conversations like mailing lists or Usenet newsgroups. In this example screenshot, Conversation Map is visualising a weeks worth of messages posted to the Usenet newsgroup ALT.TV.X-FILES.

Map of the Market, from SmartMoney.com, maps the stock performance of 500 US corporation. Individual companies are represented by different plots of land sized according to their market capitalisation. The colour of the plot indicates recent changes in stock price. It was developed by Martin Wattenberg. [For more information see the Map of Month article, "Show Me The Money: The Map of the Market" in Mappa.Mundi Magazine, August 2001.]

An example map from Luc Girardin's, The Graduate Institute of International Studies, Switzerland, "cyberspace geography visualization" system.

This is a WEBSOM document map of a Usenet newsgroup produced by the Neural Networks Research Centre at the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

This example is SiteMap developed by Xia Lin, Drexel University, maps part of the Web space relating to astronomy and space science as stored in the Yahoo directory. The hierarchical, text listing in Yahoo is transformed into landuse cybermap.

 

Lighthouse provides a visual interface to Web search engines. It was developed by Anton Leuski, a graduate student in the Computer Science Department at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A demo version allowed you to visualise the results from major search engines such as Google and Excite. For more information see the technical paper, "Lighthouse: Showing the Way to Relevant Information", by Anton Leuski and James Allan, from the Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2000 (InfoVis 2000), Salt Lake City, Utah, October 9-10, 2000.

 

 

"ET-Map" - a multi-level category map of the information space of over 100,000 entertainment related Web pages listed by Yahoo!. ET-Map is one of a number of information visualisation technique developed by researchers,lead by Hsinchun Chen, at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Arizona, USA. [For more information see the Map of Month article, "A Map of Yahoo!" in Mappa.Mundi Magazine.]

A multi-scale self-organising map (SOM) of research interests in geography based on analysis of the abstracts to Association of American Geographyers conference. The map is an example of the innovative information mapping work being undertaken by André Skupin, Department of Geography, University of New Orleans. He is particularly interested the potential of applying cartographic design concepts to information visualisation. More information on Skupin's research is given here: Skupin A. and Fabrikant, S.I. (2003). "Spatialization Methods: A Cartographic Research Agenda for Non-Geographic Information Visualization", Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Vol. 30, No. 2, pages 95-119.

 

A map of the social patterns of an electronic community produced by Visual Who developed by Judith S. Donath, Media Lab, MIT, USA.

Further work on social visualisation is shown below. These are images from Chat Circles, an abstract visual interface to real-time conversations on the Internet. It is being developed by Fernanda B. Viégas and Judith Donath, Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab. The colour, size and location of the circles are used to visually represent the structure and dynamics of the conversations. The image on the right show the representation of conversational histories. You can try Chat Cirles from here. See their paper on Chat Circles at CHI'99 for further information.

These are information maps using astronomical metaphors to browse articles in the Rhizome artbase archive of Internet art. Individual articles are represented by stars, with their brightness in proportion to how popular they are. The example above is called StarryNight and was developed by Alex Galloway and Mark Tribe. Shown opposite is the Spiral interface developed by Martin Wattenberg. More details on Wattenberg's work is available at mw2mw.

HistoryWired - another excellent example of the potential of online information maps, developed by Martin Wattenberg. It is built on the existing Map of the Market technology to provide an interactive browsing map of a diverse collection of objects from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

An information map of global news stories from NewsMaps. The map summaries 121 online news reports from December 13th 1999. NewsMaps is powered by ThemeScape technology from Cartia. Cartia was acquired by Aurigin Systems, Inc. and, unfortunately, NewsMaps is no more. ThemeScape is still available. [For more information see the Map of Month article, "NewsMaps: Topographic Mapping of Information".]

As part of the Netscan project at Microsoft Research this treemap tool provides a 2d space-filling visualisation of specified chunks of the USENET newsgroup hierarchy. This example shows the newsgroups from the rec.music hierarchy, with the size of each box showing the number of posts and colour indicating changing popularity of the group. The system was developed by Andrew Fiore and Marc Smith.

Further examples of Netscan's USENET visualisations are shown on the topology page of the Atlas.

Kartoo - les cartes du web. An interesting network metaphor as a visual interface to search engine results.

Websites can be indexed and mapped by geographic location. This example is the UK clickable map and provides a map directory of the websites of all universities and colleges in the United Kingdom. It is maintained by Peter Burden at the University of Wolverhampton. [For more information see the Map of Month article, "Indexing the Web with Geography Information", November 2000.]

	WebMap, an interactive, multi-level visual directory that maps 2 million plus web sites. It is a browser plug-in which represents hierarchical categories as irregular shaped polygons. A smooth zoom brings more detailed categories into view. Individual websites in the categories are shown by small mountain symbols.

ContactMap is a prototype information map for visually managing your social network. For more information see the paper "Integrating communication and information through ContactMap" by Bonnie A. Nardi, Steve Whittaker, Ellen Isaacs, Mike Creech, Jeff Johnson and John Hainsworth.

| Introduction | Whats New | Conceptual | Artistic | Geographic | Cables & Satellites | Traceroutes |
| Census | Topology | Info Maps | Info Landscapes | Info Spaces | ISP Maps | Weather Maps |
| Wireless | Web Site Maps | Surf Maps | MUDs & Virtual Worlds | Historical |

(© Copyright - Martin Dodge, 2007)

Sorry, the Cybergeography Research web pages are no longer being updated. The project ran from 1997-2004, but my research has moved away into other areas (see my blog for latest). If you have any questions or comments, please email me at: m.dodge (at) manchester.ac.uk.  Cheers, Martin Dodge, February 2007.