Presentations – creating and sharing online

One of the effects of the social web is the increased need for communicators to share their thoughts and work and make them available to various people across the web and the world. A series of platform have therefore emerged. Websites like Slideshare for example enable users to upload, share, embed, index and search presentations based on tags.

Issuu for example presents similar features but promises to turn the uploaded documents into “beautiful online publications”. For elaborate conference papers or research results this is a great site to use. 

Tilestack and Prezi have their own take on making a presentation interesting. The first invites the user to create interactive presentations and games. The latter offers a set platform and plenty of customization choices. I, for one, am more inclined to use Prezi for conference presentations, Issuu for special documents and Slideshare for work related presentations I need to be embedded in my LinkedIn profile. 

Sources: Mashable, TechCrunch, AndyMiah

Visualisation tools

Over the past few months, I have come across a series of visualization options for new media research and not only. My favorite right now is ManyEyes, a platform powered by IBM, that offers plenty of visualization options for both qualitative and quantitative data.

What you do: upload your data set and start exploring

Features: Visualize relationships among data points, compare  sets of values, track rises and falls over time or analyze text. Discussion forum for data visualizations, easy sharing and visualization ratings.

Advantages: You might find some of these features in other programs but the advantage of ManyEyes lies within the dynamic representation of the data and within the option of giving multiple visualizations to the same data set. Also, you can easily share or embed your visualizations. No programming skills are required.

Disadvantages: the need to create a login with IBM and having your data sets and graphs made public as soon as they’re uploaded. Also, there are no data set editing options yet so if the data you uploaded has even the slightest error, you’ll have to go upload a new set. The text analysis data is rather basic so for in-depth analysis I’d still recommend a qualitative data analysis software such as nVivo or CatPac. Finally, the resolution of some of the graphs is quite low and display size quite small. This can make the exploration of big data set visualizations difficult.

For those that are better at programming, who know Java or Adobe Flash or are willing to try something new, I found two platforms that offer similar features with ManyEyes but allow a higher degree of customization. They are Prefuse and Tulip. Both are softwares and need to be downloaded on your computer.

Also, if you are interested only in tag clouds, then Wordle.net allows you to instantly create them without requiring a login. Such images are particularly useful when wanting to show, for example, what are the most frequent words used in a text.

Amaztype works in a similar manner but the typographic visuals it creates are based on Amazon searches. You can choose your Amazon store, the media type you want to search for (book/music/video or DVD) and the topic. When the visual is done, you can then zoom in and explore the results. This how the web 2.0 search in Amazon.co.uk looks like.

For Google News visualizations and its constantly changing there is now NewsMap. It is based on a treemap visualization (also offered by ManyEyes if you’re interested in this for your data) that can be queried based on a series of variables: country, category and date. According to Marcos Weskamp “Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.”

And finally, a project that I know of for some time: We Feel Fine. This allows you to investigate how people were feeling at a specific moment in time allowing you to choose from a huge library of adjectives and to narrow the results depending on gender, data, country and weather. When controversial events are researched, this might offer some interesting insight into people’s moods and attitudes.

guest lecture @ Imperial College, London

On Monday, March 23, I gave a lecture on using web 2.0 to promote creativity and creative work in social media and professional environments. The attendees of the lecture were students from the Missouri School of Journalism of the University of Missouri-Columbia in the USA, now in London for a semester doing internships related to their undergraduate majors. All the thanks to Byron T. Scott, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Missouri – Columbia, who made this all possible. 

It was an evening meeting that took place in one of the rooms of the Imperial College in London after the students had finished their busy and challenging working days. I was impressed to find out about the prestigious companies they were interning with and the daily activities on their agendas. Similarly, I was impressed by how interested the students were in new media and their desire to experiment with it much higher than the one of the European students (from the UK or Belgium) that I have lectured to before. While most of the students seems to use social networks because most of their friends do there is little awareness of privacy policies and how these can be changed so that personal information can be kept separate from professional one. Similarly, most of the students  have heard of many of the platforms available online (from blogging, to social media, live streaming – be it audio or radio) but their knowledge stopped there. Also, many of them had the skills and talent to produce high-quality content for these platforms but proved to be quite reluctant to experiment with them the fear that their creative work will wrongly appropriated by somebody else being higher than the desire of making themselves and their talent known.

While having a master’s degree in social networking such as the recently launched by the Birmingham City University might not necessary, students now enrolled in media schools (focusing on arts, journalism, communication…) should however be exposed more to social media as well as be encouraged to explore this realm rather than taking it for granted.