Information About Information

Understanding Shakespeare / Book

Understanding Shakespeare is the B.A. thesis project of Stephan Thiel at the Interfacedesign program of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Its goal is to introduce a new form of reading drama to help understand Shakespeare’s works in new and insightful ways and to address our changed habits of consuming narrative works and knowledge through the capabilities of information visualization.

As a result, and based on data from the WordHoard project of the Northwestern University, an application of computational tools was explored in order to extract and visualize the information found within the text and to reveal its underlying narrative algorithm. The five approaches presented here are the first step towards a dicussion of this potentionally new form of reading in an attempt to regain interest in the literary and cultural heritage of Shakespeare’s works among a general audience.

The visualizations were designed as large scale prints (90cm x ~220cm) for an exhibition scenario that would enable a broad audience to re-understand Shakespeare. They were created using mainly Processing and toxiclibs (for geometry and color calculations) as well as several other Natural Language Processing libraries (i.e. Classifier4J). Please be aware that the experience of these works might differ substantially between the web and the original printed version.

The Dream Job Project: Part 1, Part 2

This is not quite “information about information” yet, but having stumbled across Michael Erard’s Dream Job Project and reading what he has set out to do and how he’s going about doing it, I cannot wait to see the final results and the tool he comes up with.

From Erard’s post: Last April, in a piece on these pages, I solicited comments from people about what they aspire to in the way of work, whether those aspirations were for a “dream job,” the next stage in one’s professional life, or a first stepping stone to something different. My thinking on this originated with the notion that aspirations offered by the culture aren’t necessarily supported by the economy, and that one possible response was to design those aspirations. Before you can design, you have to have a 360º view of the structure of the work. With that, you could build an aspiration design tool, a dashboard of options and choices, something to help you measure where you are and where you want to be.