Google’s Street View needs a conscience

(Engels)

Google has launched the Street View application in The Netherlands. This is another phase in Google’s mission to organise the world’s information by building a 3D-environment. Simon Davies, a surveillance watchdog, stated: “The cultural imperative within Google is anti-privacy”. From his perspective that is certainly the case, but then they probably would follow a different strategy (figure below).

Google's alternative anti-privacy strategy.

project: MyDatabody, visualizing the network

(Engels)

A growing amount of personal information about a growing amount of people becomes publicly available online. When Google-ing someone’s name, it’s normal these days that a whole list of data pops up that could consist of, among others: career related data, past activities, holiday pictures, blogging and commenting, Social Network (SN) profile data, etc. At first it were merely youngsters that have been familiar with using the internet their whole life that did not really care about privacy (or did not realize the importance) and put all their information out there, available and for grabs for everybody. Not long ago also older generations have joined in and are uploading more and more personal content to the web. These are some interesting trends that will probably become more prominent in the near future.

data body 2.0 (excerpt of visualizing the network)

(Engels)

At this moment, we are in a transition of conventional analog identification to digital virtual identification. Hereby, a mutual trust between government and civilians plays an essential role. The lack of a pure form of identification can result in an emergence of many restrictions and legislations based on movement in the physical and virtual space.

paper: Battle of Connotations. MacEachren’s typology of Map signs vs. Graphs

(Engels)

This paper focuses on two issues, within the realms of information visualization. Firstly, MacEachren’s typology of connotative map signs is examined by applying them to Google Maps. Google Maps should, following this concept, expose several connotations about the map itself and should expose connotations about the topic mapped. Section 2.1 and 2.2  will briefly summarize the crux of MacEachren’s a lexical approach to map representation, which will be an introduction towards section 2.3 and 2.4. They elaborate respectively on (1) connotations of veracity and -integrity and (2) valuative, and incitive connotations and –power  in conjunction with Google Maps. Secondly, section 3 examines whether MacEachren’s typology concerning connotative signs of maps could be applied to Graphs. By examining Wainer’s (1983) rules of bad data display and the extraction of basic Graph element. Section 4 conclude with an elaboration on the similarities between connotations of map signs and the extracted elements of Graphs.

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