Pearltrees – Visual bookmarking

Pearltrees, out of France, offers a kind of visual mapping of the internet. It is a form of social-bookmarking, like Delicious.com – however, it is more than a text-based database of saved bookmarks and tags. One’s bookmarks (or Pearls) stand in visual relation with other pearls and on contextual branches. Even more interesting, one may browse and discover nearby Pearltrees based upon similarity in content and metadata.

The dimensions that I find even more compelling, are that as an internationally used site that is visually and contextually arranged, not only does it seem to be used by many artists, designers and other visual and intuitive thinkers, but it offers intriging geo-political dimensions as well. No longer limited by the wall of text (which may be in a language that one is not savvy in) – one can visually browse foreign political, social, cultural, historical content based upon relational and contextual braccia. Just as one learns languages best by immersion and context, exposure to this visual arrangement of foreign links strengthens not only one’s understanding of that language, but increases exponentially one’s intuitive grasp of the creator’s content.

A brief sample from Dec. 4, 2009 of current Pearl categories contained many political, technical, artistic and theoretical subjects: Data Visualization, Social Media, Twitter, e-Democratie, Photos ‘Creative Commons’, Hackers/Hacking, Languages semantique, Teacher Resources, Google.

Concerns:
-There does not seem to be privacy settings similar to Delicious.com whereby one can choose to share a bookmark or not.

Functional review:
-There is the ability to import one’s Delicious.com bookmarks which I was initially thrilled about – yet after doing so I discovered that Pearltrees essentially threw the new Pearls on randomly created branches that did not seem governed by contextual relevance. I do not know if this is a problem of the metadata itself – I was not able to discern a logical pattern to how these Pearls were created nor grouped based upon my Delicious tags. At this point I removed my import and will hand curate the Pearltrees.
-Moving and connecting the Pears to ‘Treebranches’ feels like maneuvering a kite around a flock of other kites: awkward and sticky, the Pearl-visualized-data eagerly gravitates to nearby branches like tail of a kite enjoying getting tangled. This is a frustration.
-A feature that would be nice: the ability to mouse-over a Pearl in order to see the listed metadata.

Google Swirl

I am consistently excited by new developments in visual browsing and searching on the web. Google’s new development to come out of Google Labs, Google Image Swirl is very provocative and is very close to something that I have been imagining. It would be fascinating it the application could be employed on pre-curated collections of images (ie. to “Google Swirl” a collection of visual art, such as ARTstor). But first, what is Google Swirl?

As a bridging of Picasa Face Recognition and Similar Images, search results depend upon both image metadata and computer vision research. There are comparisons to Google’s Wonder Wheel (which displays search results graphically) and Visual Thesaurus. One enters a search term and 12 groupings of images appear visualized as photo stacks. One chooses a particular image and the Flash experimental interface “swirls” to display your image and branches to numerous other images with varying degrees of relationship to that image.

Spezify

[cross-posted from the Digital Curation blog]

I have died and gone to heaven. Spezify “is a search tool that presents textual, graphic, and photographic results in a visual format. Blogs, videos, microblogs and images, couple with web-based versions of more traditional print media to give comprehensive search results.”

For a visual thinker that loves to scour everything from Twitter to YouTube to blogs in search of the latest from galleries, artists, conferences, scholars, designers…Spezify pools and presents information in a visual collage format. It also shows you related search terms (which may or may not be relevant – i.e. an important interntational conference for Contemporary Asian Art is going on right now – so the current search of that term brought up “hotel” as a related term.)

Like Twitter, it also shows you recent “hot” search terms. Spezify displays the information in a giant visual wall that you can scroll in all dimensions. Via Twitter, Cooliris told me that there is a way that I can d/l their program even though I have a PowerPC Mac mini. This weekend I will do so and see if Spezify’s search results can be navigated on the visual wall of Cooliris. This would make for faster and improved scanning functionality.

Visible Archive Series Browser

Originally published on Digital Curation class blog, 9/23/09

Two days ago Vimeo demonstrated the “Series Browser”: a visualisation of approximately 65,000 series from the National Archives of Australia’s collection. Mitchell Whitelaw created this as a prototype and part of his Visible Archive – “a research project on the interactive visualisation of archival datasets.”

I am very excited about the prospects these kinds of visualization technologies can have on digital scholarship, particularly in the areas of the arts and history. The browser is interactive, with visualized archival series (represented by squares) arranged both chronologically and in terms of relations to other series. When one scrolls over a series a bubble appears with general scope and content information. The size of the series is illustrated by how big the square is. An inner square represents the volume and the outer square represents the physical shelf space that the series occupies. By selecting and zooming in on a series – lines demonstrating relationships with other series appear (different kind of link relationships are categorized by different colors).

One can also browse and research by agencies outside of series to gain broader context. All this is handled through interaction with the visualized data.

Three hours ago Mitchell launched a video demo describing the A1 Explorer, a similarly interactive visualization of the A1 series in the National Archives of Australia. In this we are looking at what appears to be a kind of tag cloud – as a word-frequency visualization of the contents based upon the item titles. When you hover over one of the words, lines linking it to related words appear. The thickness of the connecting lines is also an additional layer of information. Selecting a text item displays a list of items belonging to that category.

Another aspect of this example is the histogram which displays visually the number of items appearing in the collection per year. This demonstrate the distribution over time but also works as another port of entry into exploring the archive. The text cloud and histogram are also linked in that hovering over a term will display how many of such items appear in the collection per year.

An additionally cool functionality of Mitchell’s visualization is that if there is a term that is dominating the text cloud – if you select and click on it you can remove it from your view and the cloud will adjust accordingly, allowing you to see and explore the remaining items in the collection. If you select an item from the list it will load a digital image of that item from the archive.

I couldn’t help but think about how cool this application would be for navigating my links in delicious.com, but really – the applicability of this for all manner of archives is immense. I hope to see this technology catch on!