Jen Southern

More experiments with visualising data today. I’ve been making drawings from a projection of the comob data. It is helping me to think about what is important to visualise when we make digital versions. Its hard to know what would be revealed by different kinds of tracking before doing it. In this image I drew every location and the connection between them. I could have drawn lines between locations sequentially as if the line were a tracing of the movement between them instead, but that doesn’t seem to be how Comob is used. In the drawing below there isn’t one single base, but several, and some relationships between locations seem stronger, or more frequent, than others.

I’ve also been making animations of comob data, comparing the kinds of movement that has been recorded, while being careful to keep people and  places anonymous. Again, this is a way to think through how visualisation can reveal different things about the connections between people. I am not using maps as background because I don’t want to reveal where people are, however its very difficult to understand anything about scale without the map. The distance could be revealed in the way it is visualised, for instance by becoming thicker and brighter when people are in closer proximity. The problem with that kind of visualisation is that it implies that the link is weaker at a greater distance, when it might be that this link makes the connection stronger in some way.

This animation is of a workshop that I ran in Nottingham last year.