« CNN's Balloon Broadcast Fiasco | Main | Geosphere: An Interactive Spinning Globe with a World of Possibilities »
August 4, 2004
A Very Creative Map of Creativity
Someone on my WWWEDU discussion list just posted a summary of a project called the Map of Creativity. It's a very cool Flash animation connected to a database of 400+ ICT initiatives around the world. When you visit the Flash site, it displays a circle made up of little dots, each representing a project. They're arranged around the circle by region; for example, Middle Eastern projects are in one part of the circle, South American projects another part. You can glide your cursor over the dots, which will magnify them and allow you to click on them for more information about the individual project.
Meanwhile, to the right of the circle is a menu that allows you to "filter" out projects based on target age group, theme, ranking, and date submitted to the database. For example, if you move your cursor over "ages 4 to 7," the site will animate the circle, magnifying the various projects that target children of that age group. And because the circle is organized by region, you can visualize immediately where these projects for this age group are geographically located. Similarly, there is a long list of themes ranging from Access, Activism and AIDS to Wildlife, Women and Youth; move your cursor over your theme of choice and again the circle will magnify all the projects relevant to that area. When you click on a theme, the circle will remove all the irrelevant projects and allow you to explore the remaining projects by applying additional filters, such as subtopic or age of target audience. Lastly, for people with disabilities, Flash-incompatible browsers, etc, you can access a simple table of all projects in the database with links to each project.
I'm really fascinated with this visualization tool and am eager to find out what the licensing is for the flash interface, as I don't know if it's open source or not. But it would be really, really fascinating to use a similar tool for visualization digital divide initiatives by location, topic, target audience, sector, etc. Definitely worth exploring further.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at August 4, 2004 11:11 AM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
