Andrea and I have been discussing how we may be able to take the visualization from last week and make it more fully encompass the work happening in the New Media Lab.

For the sake of clarity, Andrea suggested trying to make it an “annual diagram” and having it as a snapshot of the lab “right now,” which would mean although there are very interesting connections and patterns that emerge when seeing past and current students, there just isn’t enough room to show them all. Space is at a premium and when you have as long of a history as we do, it may not be possible to represent them all in a web browser [but if we were making a poster, perhaps then it would be a fun experiment to try to include all present and former NML researchers].

Andrea and I have been brainstorming what topics/connections we wish to illustrate. We’d like to be all encompassing, but we’d also like to illustrate patterns outside of tools: methodologies and academic departments.

We’ve come up with a brief list so far as a starting point of some general approaches as well as some specific tools that we know students are using right now:

Tools:
Omeka
Wordpress
Google Maps
GIS
Javascript
Mobile Apps
Flash
IndexZibit
Link Data
HTML
CSS

Methodologies:
Curation
Participatory Design
Crowdsourcing
Text Analysis
Geography/Geotagging
Visualization
Audio

Other
Pedagogy
Digital Humanities

…but now we have to see if this list is truly inclusive or at least representative of the full body of work in progress. We can go one of two ways from here. We can either a) populate the list based off our experience and knowledge of the work here or b) ask our students to self select and add any tools or methodologies which we’ve left out. The former would ensure a rather tight list of categories that we know there would be a myriad of interesting connections; the latter might create many more small categories which don’t overlap as nicely. Many projects have unintended similarities, even though two projects from different disciplines might use different words at first glance, upon conversation may realize that they really are doing the exact same thing.