Paolo Ciuccarelli

Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.

From Data to Knowledge - Visualizations as Transformation Processes within the Data-Information-Knowledge Continuum

In this paper we suggest a different approach that considers visualizations in the wider domain of communication and defines a model capable of taking into account the context in which visualizations act as communication tools. In this perspective we consider visualizations as transformation processes within the Data-Information-Knowledge (DIK) continuum. In the paper we discuss the continuum, and apply the transformation process model to the main disciplines of visualization. Visualizations represent powerful cognitive tools that surround our everyday life [1]. By doing this we are able to think about visualization from a multidisciplinary perspective, exploring the role of visualizations in design practice, as artifacts that are used in facing problems of various degrees of complexity and nature. The contribution of the model is mainly addressed to orientate and nurture the reflective practice and to formalize the strategic more than the technical role of visualizations in the design discipline.

City sensing: visualising mobile and social data about a city scale event

Streams of information flow through our cities thanks to: their progressive instrumentation with diverse sensors, a wide adoption of smart phones and social networks, and a growing open release of datasets. City Data Fusion project investigates techniques to visualise the pulse of our cities in real-time by fusing and making sense of all those information flows. It exploits visual data analytics, semantic technologies, and streaming databases. In this poster, we offer insights on City Sensing: an early result of City Data Fusion that allows to visually analyse city scale events such as Milano Design Week.

Urbanscope: A Lens to Observe Language Mix in Cities:

Cities of the 21st century are places where various actors interact, where physical systems, that are sometime geographically distant, are strictly dependent, where relational mechanisms become crucial, and where the boundaries between individual and collective, local and global, real and digital become more and more blurred. In this context, social media can be used as a digital lens to analyze the space and the territory of cities. In fact, they offer a great opportunity to individualize and understand the connections that might exist between different spheres. In this article, we use Twitter to analyze the language mix of the city and to detect language communities within the city neighborhoods. We then compare these “digital” communities, discovered through Twitter, with the “real” communities identified by the traditional census data. Milan, a city which is increasingly becoming an international melting pot, is chosen as a case study for this work.

Weaving data, slicing views: a design approach to creating visual access for digital archival collections

Digital archives metadata suggest a rich and complex system of relationships between the different properties of archived items, which is often not properly represented. Lomen is a research project aimed at exploiting the richness of digital archives, stitching up the relationships between entities and providing visual access to the system. This paper presents the design process used to create such visual access for architect Baldessaris historical archives. The research results in a digital platform that allows users to explore contents in a non-linear way, identifying patterns and fostering insight. The platform also aims at weaving together several levels of information through direct linking to archive entities such as projects, artifacts or individuals involved. Curators are also given the ability to elaborate theme-based paths, providing varied and unique entry points to the underlying data to users.

Mind the Graph: From Visualization to Collaborative Network Constructions

Social and Human Sciences have recently discovered the potential of a hybrid research process, where the specificity of design knowledge and the peculiarity of design thinking can be exploited. Two ongoing experiences demonstrate how - after a first stage where Communication Design has been placed at the end of a linear sequence from data to prototypes - a more integrated and collaborative research process can be established, building on the proclivity of humanities scholars to mingle thinking and making.

Knot: an interface for the study of social networks in the humanities

This paper describes the design of Knot, a digital tool for exploring historical social networks, developed within a multidisciplinary research context involving designers, humanities scholars and computer scientists. The goal of the tool is to provide scholars and researchers with an environment for exploring multi-dimensional and heterogeneous data, allowing them to discover and create explicit and implicit relationships between people, places and events. What distinguishes our approach to traditional network exploration and analysis is an emphasis on the construction of the network graph through the visual interface, rather than on its static observation. Knot aims to explore new opportunities for interface design and information visualization within the definition of novel research practices in the humanities, bringing together scholars, HCI, design, and computer science communities.

Depicting the Data City

In this chapter, we review the fast-expanding and multi-faceted classes of geo-referenced data visualization. By analyzing and interpreting existing projects based on static, motion graphics, and interactive visualizations of geographical information, we have built a taxonomy that crosses and groups the selected cases according to several classes of variables. The chapter presents both how we selected, divided, interrelated, and organized the collected material and our interpretation of the taxonomy. The chapter ends with a presentation of the potentialities of the taxonomy.

We Live in Informational Landscapes

In this chapter, we reflect upon how the urban experience is nowadays affected by data produced through interconnected, digital ecosystems such as the user-generated content on social media. We will present the scientific literature related to studies, research projects, and commercial platforms that use geo-located social mining techniques to extract urban knowledge. We will also analyze the state of the art in this thematic field and identify opportunities for further investigation.

Designing diagrams for Wikipedia

Despite the high usage of diagrams and images in Wikipedia, as well as across all Wikimedia projects, few studies have been conducted on the role of visual contents within the online encyclopedia and on the collaborative creation of diagrams. This article describes research that brought a group of designers into Wikipedia, with the goal of exploring how information designers act on this platform and how other users react to their involvement. Inspired by the WikiEdu Program, we engaged postgraduate design students in the creation of diagrams for Wikipedia and then followed the reactions of both users and designers to their work. The results of the experiment have been evaluated using built-in Wikipedia functions (e.g., page history and discussion pages) and through an anonymous survey among the students involved. This experience brought to light the different consideration granted to images and diagrams with respect to texts on the online encyclopedia. It also allowed a reflection on the role of designers in the knowledge production process, as well as on the meaning of producing “open” contents, which are meant to be improved by other people.