Collaborative Tools Project

I recently had to put together a collection of tools for "thinking visually" and thought it would be good to share it here. It is basically a collection of tools for you to try. The starting point was finding ways to display quantitative information but we also had to cover the creation of more emotive or softer images that communicate an idea, maybe very effectively, with less reliance on the numbers. My mind is always drawn initially back to this image, which plots Napoleon's Army's size, position, direction and even the weather into one chart. From:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard  and of course the books of Edward Tufte . But we also looked at images such as this one, that looks at data gathered about attitudes to the Hijab in Denmark. I find it interesting that even though I can't see what the percentages refer to in the image below, I am blown away by the idea of a headscarf pie chart. In some ways, it almost doesn'...

Yesterday I went to a presentation about  Analysing Collaborative Processes and Interaction Patterns in Online Discussions from researchers at the OU. I found myself getting quite fired up, not in a good way, about their early work, which looked at how 12 students had worked on a collaborative task - generating 29 messages ( this was 2001 folks ). They went on to categorise the messages (by hand) like this... Joint knowledge building Asking questions, dialogue extension prompts Supporting with reference or example Acknowledging/ replying / referring to another message Motivation and commitment to task Instructions/information - coordination messages ... and then diagrams were drawn. I then found myself getting all worked up, not in a good way, about the diagrams, in which ( for me ) too much liberty had been taken with the spacial layout of the data, robbing it of potential meaning. For example, orphan messages were collected at the side, when maybe they should have ...