Social Visualization

Judith Donath

Sociable Media Group

MIT Media Lab

Email: judith[at]media.mit.edu

The goal of social visualization is to create intuitive depictions of social information for social purposes. There are many challenges and questions in this endeavor, including the analytic (what are the relevant data?),the interpretive (what do the patterns mean?) and the artistic (how can we accurately represent the content of the data and also evoke appropriate intuitive responses?) This course investigates these ideas through a series of readings, critiques and design studies. Students will analyze the rhythms of online conversations, the patterns found in email archives, and the characteristic activities of individuals; they will depict them using lines, colors, sounds, movement and interactions. We will study the perceptual basis of various visualization solutions, looking indepth at problems such as how to depict subjective information, the privacy issues raised by making hidden social patterns visible, and methods for using visualizations as the basis for graphical and immersive environments.

introduction: what is social visualization
social networks: foci, strong and weak links
basic design elements: using color, form and line
the social structure of conversations
time, narrative and history
Inhabited visualizations: large scale conversations
visualizing email
data portraits
visualized faces
Spaces, metaphors and maps
Visualization as architecture: embedding social information in the world around us