Graphs are essentially composed by two kinds of objects: nodes and edges. Nodes are like the stations in a train map, while edges are the links that connect the different stations.

Of course one wants to be able to move from station to station in any direction! Similarly in a graph one wants to be able to jump back and forth from node to node using any of the links provided. That’s the beauty of it!

Although the underlying data allowed for this, the SN SciGraph Explorer website wasn’t fully supporting this kind of navigation. So we’ve now started to add a number of ‘related objects’ sections that reveal these pathways more clearly.

For example, now it’s much easier to get to the organizations and grants an article relates to:

Or, for a book edition, to see its chapters and related organizations:

And much more..  Take a look at the site yourself to find out.

Finally, we improved the linked data visualization included in every page by adding distinctive icons to each object type – so to make it easier to understand the immediate network of an object at a glance. E.g. see this grant:

SN SciGraph is primarily about opening up new opportunities for open data and metadata enthusiasts who want to do more things with our content, so we hope that these additions will make discovering data items easier and more fun.

Any comments? We’d love to hear from you. Otherwise, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more updates.

PS: this blog was posted on the SN Research Data space too.

Traditionally, digital humanities projects that produce historical databases tend to present their data using a classic tabular format, which is roughly the equivalent of a bibliographic record (e.g. as used in library softwares) only for historical data (e.g. so to present information about persons, documents, facts).

This approach has the advantage of offering a wealth of information within a clean and well organised interface, thus simplifying the task of finding what we are looking for during a search. However, by combining all the data in a single view, this approach also hides some of the key dimensions used by historians in order to make sense of the materials at hand. For example, such dimensions could be deriving from a higher-level analysis that focuses on spatio-historical, genealogical or socio-political patterns.

The limitations of the tabular format become even more evident when we consider that the PoMS database contains more than 80000 facts about 20000 people/institutions active in medieval Scotland. How were these people connected? Can we explore this network in a more interactive, game-like manner than the classic database-like structures? In other words, how can we help users see the ‘big picture’?

PoMS Laboratories

PoMS researchers have sifted through more than 8000 charters and have extracted a pretty amazing amount of information from them. Now that the database is online and can be searched via the usual mechanisms (keywords, facets) historians can investigate aspects of the making of Scotland in a small fraction of the time it would have taken them otherwise.
However, almost paradoxically, by making available such a large quantity of data in structured format new problems are arising too. Information overload is one of them: how can this wealth of data can be compared, correlated and organized into more meaningful units? How can we present the same data in a more piecemeal fashion, according to predefined pathways or views on the dataset that aim at making explicit some of the coherence principles of the historical discourse?

In order to investigate further these questions in the last months I developed the PoMS Labs, a section of the PoMS website that contains a number of prototypes usable to interact with PoMS data in innovative ways. In general, with these tools we aimed at addressing the needs of both non-expert users (e.g., learners) – who could simultaneously access the data and get a feeling for the meaningful relations among them – and experts alike (e.g., academic scholars) – who could be facilitated in the process of analysing data within predefined dimensions, so to highlight patterns of interest that would be otherwise hard to spot.

What follows contains more information about three of these prototype tools, which I think will give you a pretty good idea of what the concept of highlighting pathways in the data means (by clicking on launch you can try out the tools for yourself – which is probably the best way to discover what this is all about!).

Note: currently the only platforms we tested the Labs on are desktop computers running the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Apple Safari.

1. Dynamic Connections Cloud (launch)

This experimental app lets you browse incrementally the network of relationships linking persons/institutions to other persons/institutions.
Since each of them is normally participating in more than one event (e.g., a transaction or a relationship factoid), we can attempt to reconstruct the network of interconnections by examining the appearance of individuals within the same event or situation.

The software lets you choose an individual and start building a ‘chain of connections‘ departing from him/her/it. Each name in the resulting connections-cloud is rendered using a different font and color, depending on the sex and on the number of common factoids being shared with the previously selected items.
At any time it is possible to go back to the main PoMS database pages in order to find out more about the individuals or factoids emerging from the connections-cloud exploration. Just click on the individual icons, or move the mouse over the links provided in order to discover more options.

The screenshot below illustrates the main functionalities of the software, and is based on a sample connection chain that starts from a rather unknown person (‘A. wife of Normam son of Malcolm‘) and arrives to a more famous institution (‘Arbroath Abbey‘).

Note: You can see a live version of the connection chain displayed above by following this link.

2. Relationships explorer (launch)

The individuals and institutions in the PoMS database are often interconnected by participating to the same events (e.g. transactions or relationships). In particular, the database contains detailed information circa the varying roles agents are playing within such events. Can we discover any interesting pattern by examining these roles? For example, do agents tend to appear always in the same role, of are there exceptions to this rule?

This visualization tool allows you to compare the different roles played by two agents played in the context of their common events. The software makes use of the D3 Sankey diagrams plugin, kindly made available by Mike Bostock. In general, Sankey diagrams are designed to show flows through a network (and are sometimes called flow diagrams).
In our case the network is always composed by three steps (person-role, event, person-role) and is relatively simple, so the Sankey diagram is mainly used in order to group nodes of the same type (e.g. roles) and provide an overview of relationships between persons and events (i.e. the ‘flow’).

The screenshot below illustrates the main functionalities of the software; in particular, it represents all existing relationships between Edward I, king of England (d.1307) and William Fraser, bishop of St Andrews (d.1297) (obviously, based on the information PoMS makes available).

Note: you can play with a live version of the specific visualisation displayed above by following this link.

3. Transactions and Witnesses (launch)

In PoMS witnesses are very important as they the persons who have witnessed a charter and are given in the witness list. Charters are usually describing some form of transaction, which is the most important type of event (‘factoid’) represented in the database. This interactive visualization lets you browse iteratively transactions and the witnesses associated to them.

Each graph starts from a transaction of choice (the ‘focus point’), and displays two levels of information: (1) all the witnesses of the transaction (normally persons or institutions), and (2) for each of these agents, all the other transactions they have witnessed.
The new transactions emerging from this network can be selected and brought to the center of the visualization (which is recalculated), thus facilitating a process of interactive exploration of the interconnections and commonalities among PoMS’s recorded transactions.

The visualization has been created thanks to the freely available JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit.

The screenshot below illustrates the main functionalities of the software; the graph is centered around a transaction (‘Agreement between Alwin, abbot of Holyrood, and Arnold, abbot of Kelso, over the Crag of Duddingston in Edinburgh‘) that has five witnesses in total.

Note: click here to see a live version of this graph.

Any feedback?

Then please do get in touch, either through this blog or the official PoMS contact page! This is all very much a work in progress, so we’re eager to hear from you.

My idea for Pathway originated when browsing Wikipedia. I would always start off quite focused on a certain subject. Unfortunately, Wikipedia articles tend to be full of distracting links, just screaming to be clicked on…
Soon enough, I found myself totally lost in myriads of loosely related pages. I canâ€t count the time I wasted on backtracing them, and if you have a bit of wiki-experience, youâ€ve probably encountered it too.
What I needed, was an application that could easily archive the path I follow through Wikipedia pages.

Some screenshots below:

This hyper-portrait introduces the audience to a remarkable man whose life centered on science, government, ecucation and issues of cultural humanism. Early in his career, Jerome Wiesner developed an audio recording laboratory at the Library of Congress and travelled extensively throughout America, capturing folk music by native performers. He directed MIT’s Research Lab for Electronics during the Cold War, served as National Science Advisor to John F. Kennedy, and eventually became President of MIT. After the end of World War II, Wiesner became a prominent advocate of disarmament and was a key player in negotiating the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In this hyper portrait (which runs on the World Wide Web), we invite viewers to explore the Twentieth Centurey through an extensible collection of stories about and recollections by the central figure. We also invite viewers who knew JBW to share a memorable story with our growing society of audience.

The flash-looking navigation interface kind of catches the eye, I must say. A few things moving on the left hand side, a matrix inspired selection menu gives pretty well the idea of some machinery combining different resources into a new narrative. It’s all realized in Java and it combines video, audio and textual resources. However, apart from the technological issues (wonder what these guys think, nowadays, about ontology-based navigation) the choice of not presenting to the user the rationale of the narrative chosen can be a limitation.

Is the sequence of resources ordered according to an explicit purpose, or what? Moreover, sometimes the resources have no caption or description, and that makes it even more difficult to contextualize them within the whole.

The site is really worth having a look at, though!!

Here is a list of key ideas from the paper:

– The Problem With the Tv Medium

Television severely limits the ways in which an author can “grow” a story. A story must be composed into a fixed, unchanging form before the audience can see and react to it: there is no obvious way to connect viewers to the process of story construction. Similarly, the medium offers no intrinsic, immediately available way to interconnect the larger community of viewers who wish to engage in debate about a particular story.

– The Editor in Software Idea

Many years ago, when I was working on my first “interactive” documentary, I was introduced to the concept of relational databases. From that time forward, I have had the sense that if we could only find the right way to index documentary film segments, then we could design an “editor in software” that would emulate the processes and expertise of the film editor. Such a system would support the human user by offering relevant suggestions, or could navigate a large database filled with many aspects of a complex story and “make choices about what the viewer would like to see next.”

– Purpose: Bringing to an Understanding of the Whys and the Hows

As the ever-optimistic filmmaker/explorer collects material, he or she hopes that a network of composite observations (“Who did what where?” etc.) will provide a way of understanding the larger “whys” and “hows” of the matter.

– The Emergence of the Story in the Editing

..each shot is placed in position, the demands of coherence, context, and continuity dictate to some degree which shots and scenes can meaningfully precede or follow. As the various pieces fall into place, a specific story–with its own particular themes, central characters, and motivations–begins to emerge.

– There Is No Final-Cut, the Story Is Undetermined

the storyteller system does not allow the author to explicitly sequence story elements into a finished tale: there is no “final cut” of the film. Instead, editing decisions are deferred until the moment of playout.

– Notion of Evolving Stories

The system is open-ended on the author’s side as well. Real-world stories are seldom complete in themselves; a detailed picture of circumstances may only emerge over the course of days, or weeks, or even several lifetimes. Thus, the resources of a story (and its associated descriptive database) can grow and evolve as newly discovered information is added, or as users add their own commentary and evaluations of quality and veracity. Stories of this type may be described as having “emergent” or “evolving” properties over time.

– Notion of Self-Playout

The ability for automatic- or self-playout, therefore, serves as a powerful design heuristic for building a storyteller system. Designing around the potential absence of a viewer requires that a system be built with enough base-level competence to present its content autonomously. The addition of interactivity poses an interesting challenge, as the role and value of the interaction must always be gauged against its absence.

– Ai Design, Without ‘Plans’

Pattie Maes describes a shift in artificial intelligence research from approaches based on “deliberate thinking” and “explicit knowledge” to ones based on “distributedness and decentralization.” She notes how these new approaches avoid the “brittleness” and “inflexibility” of the former by using “dynamic interaction with the environment and intrinsic mechanisms to cope with resource limitations and incomplete knowledge.”
The applicability or usefulness of each action is a function of the current state of the environment. When an action is selected and performed, its invocation alters the environment, thus influencing the selection of future actions. In this way, a sequence of actions–a plan–emerges.

– Taking Inspiration from recent Research in AI, the Concept of Emergence is introduced As Some Sort of Feedback Looping mechanism That Feeds New Input Values Into the Same recursive Algorythm….

The applicability or usefulness of each action is a function of the current state of the environment. When an action is selected and performed, its invocation alters the environment, thus influencing the selection of future actions. In this way, a sequence of actions–a plan–emerges.

– And the Same Process Is Located in the Hypermedia Generation Process: the Story As an Emergent Property of the Interaction

When invoked, both materials and keywords spread activation to their associated modules. The resulting interaction of the spreading activation forms the basis of how materials are selected and sequenced. Thus, the resulting structure of the story is an “emergent property” of the interaction of individual material presentations.

– Expressions, Not Characters

In an automatist storyteller system, the fundamental units of structure are not events to be expressed but expressions themselves in the form of discrete units of content. Instead of characters interacting in an environment that is literally the “story world,” individual expressions interact in an environment that is the process of storytelling.

– Rousseau’s Invisible Hand Theory

In this decentralized approach, the viewer is a full-fledged member of the system and consistently integrated into the experience. This contrasts with the model of hypermedia, where the consistency of viewer interactivity depends on the author’s consistency in establishing links. In addition, while the operation of the system is open to the influence of viewer interaction, it is never dependent upon it.

– Activation Mechanism Drive the Visual Features

Every keyword and material in ConTour has an associated activation value. When a keyword is clicked on or a material is presented to the viewer, the activation value of the element is raised (the element is injected with activation). Together, the activation values of every keyword and material in ConTour form a closed or “relative value system,” which serves as the basis for both the automatic material selection algorithm and the system’s graphical display.
Activation values are used to determine how elements are drawn on the screen; the element’s size, depth or z-coordinate, and brightness are all derived from its activation value. The system uses activation to represent an individual element’s relevance to the current “context” of the story playout.

– ..thus: Constructing a ‘Good’ Story Is Analogous to Constructing a ‘Well Formed Formula’.

The process of story construction is typically viewed as one of generating a sequence of events, or a plot, based on the potential actions of characters’ internal rules (or “motivations”) while maintaining certain global rules (such as gravity or logical cause and effect). Ultimately, the challenge of constructing a “good” story is reduced to the process of creatively expressing a well-formed chain of events.

– This Is a Key Difference With a First-Person Role Game, for Example. the Fundamental Units of Structure Are Already Some Expressions of Events, Not Events to Be Expressed! This Aspect Can Have Further Development: in the Different Cases What Is the Story-World / Narration-World Relationship?
I

n an automatist storyteller system, the fundamental units of structure are not events to be expressed but expressions themselves in the form of discrete units of content. Instead of characters interacting in an environment that is literally the “story world,” individual expressions interact in an environment that is the process of storytelling.

– More Experimental Results:

Based on the casual observation of hundreds of demonstrations, the visualization of spreading activation is an extremely effective communicative device.
[…]
Respondents especially liked the nonlinear approach toward the subject and presentation of content.
[…]
All respondents were in fact, able to piece together concepts, ideas, and facts from “Random Walk” and make statements which indicated their assimilation of these ideas.
In evaluating a storyteller system, it is difficult to separate the form and content of a story from the system itself. Evaluating story, particularly a somewhat esoteric documentary story, will inevitably remain problematic–as Yeats observed, “How do we tell the dancer from the dance?”