What’s this galaxy-like cluster of dots and lines? It’s the TED Fellows Collaboration Network MAPP, a rich and interactive web that shows the patterns of cross-disciplinary collaboration among TED Fellows over the past four years. This rainbow visualization was created using MAPPR, a cloud-based network mapping tool that Eric Berlow demoed during TED2014. It allows anyone to make shareable, interactive network visualizations.
The TED Fellows program began as a way to support and amplify the work of thinkers and innovators through the conference. But then something unexpected happened – the professionally diverse community, which includes scientists, makers, activists, artists, technologists and more, became its own living, breathing organism. Fellows began reaching out to each other for all manner of cross-disciplinary collaborations. A few examples include:
- Filmmaker and sitar player Andrew Mendelson working with open-hardware guru Catarina Mota to incorporate programmable Arduino-powered tuners on his Carbon Fiber Sitar project.
- Satirist and designer Safwat Saleem working with applied mathematician Max Little to help make all the visuals for his TEDMED talk on his revolutionary work to blend math and data science for the advancement of medicine.
- Microbial ecologist Jessica Green collaborating with photojournalist John Adam Huggins and filmmaker Anita Doron to create a sci-fi graphic novel about the human microbiome set in Paris.
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Tissue engineer Nina Tandon writing a TED Book with architect and futurist Mitch Joachim called Super Cells: Building with Biology.
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Social media entrepreneur Suleiman Bakhit collaborating with strategist Adrian Hong during the Libyan revolution in 2011, to help open the door for the evacuation of tens of thousands of injured civilians and provide them with urgent medical care in Jordan. This collaboration had to be kept secret to avoid retaliation from the Libyan regime; it was mentioned publicly for the first time on the TED Fellows stage in Vancouver this year.
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Bakhit also happens to be working with neuroscientist and poet Ivana Gadjanski to turn one of her poems into a comic book.
A whopping 84% of the Fellows documented in the collaboration network had at least one cross-disciplinary collaboration. And MAPPR itself is a creative collaboration among three Fellows: ecologist and network scientist Eric Berlow, artist/designer David Gurman and computer scientist Kaustuv DeBiswas, who together launched Vibrant Data, a data storytelling boutique in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They’re now focused on building MAPPR to enable the understanding of complex networks. Custom projects include mapping the collaboration network of faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and visualizing the ecology of human creativity.
We asked Berlow to tell us more. Below, an edited transcript of our conversation.
What is MAPPR? What does it do?
It’s a cloud-based tool that lets anyone publish interactive visual stories about how things are connected. These network stories can be about anything — from the network structure of collaborations as with the TED Fellows, to identifying patterns of funding among donors and grant recipients, to unraveling the complexity of conflict. In one of our recent projects, we have mapped the conflict in Syria (see below), in collaboration with Vibrant Data’s conflict analyst, Scott Field. The Syrian civil war is widely regarded as the defining political crisis for the future of the Middle East. One of the main reasons it will be so hard to resolve is that is not a “stand-alone” conflict, but involves a complex intertwining of the vital strategic interests of all major powers that make up the regional security system. The Vibrant Data team aggregated expert analysis of the conflict to visualize that tangle of interests and identify its emergent structure. We hope that visualizing the structure of this conflict—and others—might help suggest pathways to resolving them sooner.
How does MAPPR work and who can use it?
MAPPR allows you to upload custom datasets of relationships and publish them as online custom network visualization stories. Each node and link in the network can be its own multimedia microsite. For example, in the TED Fellows collaboration network, each node can contain people’s bios, images, videos and so on, and each link can display multimedia information about that specific collaboration.
Network visualization isn’t new, but it has remained relatively inaccessible to non-experts. Anyone can use MAPPR. It’s designed to make network science accessible to anyone interested in visualizing and sharing a story — or Network MAPP — about how things are connected. MAPPR is currently in private beta, and people can sign up at Mappr.io. We’ll notify them when it’s ready, likely at the end of April 2014.
During your talk at TED2014, you seemed bowled over by the results of the Fellows collaborations survey. Why do you think TED Fellows collaborations are so prolific and unusual?
We live in a world where we generally match like with like. Just look at any online suggestion engine! While this approach is great if you’re shopping for red shoes, if broadly applied, it has the potential to kill the creative innovation that comes from serendipitous encounter and unexpected remixes. The Fellows program does a remarkable job of selecting individuals who are not only incredibly diverse and interdisciplinary, but also have in common that they are extraordinarily open to new ideas and working together.
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Frederic Kaplan has built an information-lush time machine that will let the curious to travel through Venetian history.
Frederic Kaplan has found an unconventional way to build a time machine. Rather than making a metal object (or, uh, a police call box) that whisks you through time and space, he wondered: Could a time machine be built out of information?
In today’s TED Talk, filmed at TEDxCaFoscariU, Kaplan previews the Venice Time Machine, a collaboration between Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne and Ca’ Fosari University, to make a geographical and historical simulation of this incredible city, whose past is perhaps the most well-documented in the world. The project is digitizing 80 kilometers of archives to re-create spaces that are now lost to time.
In a similar vein, Google recently opened up its Google Maps Engine, which lets ordinary people add rich data to Google Maps, so that “together we can organize the world’s geospatial information and make it accessible.” Last month, they revealed that National Geographic is taking part in the public data project. National Geographic has been around since 1888 — it has funded more than 10,000 research expeditions over the years and published 800 maps. They have some really cool ones.
“Maps and geography are integral to everything we do; it’s even part of our name,” says National Geographic’s Director of Digital Development Frank Biasi in a Q&A. “People have collected our magazine fold-out maps for over a hundred years, and many of those maps are sequestered away in attics and garages. The public data program gives us the opportunity to release our amazing map collection to the wider world.”
A far-away view of a Google Maps/National Geographic collaboration, to show you medieval England. Click the link and scroll down the page to explore this map.
In one of the sample Google Maps created through this collaboration, a map of medieval England is overlayed on a contemporary map. Symbols on the map denote towns, churches and cathedrals, battles, and “Great Houses and Palaces.” As you move about the map, you can also browse an article on the social ladder of the Middle Ages, and read up on cathedral architecture.
“We will also use Maps Engine to overlay our maps with interactive editorial content, so the maps can ‘tell stories’ and raise awareness about environmental issues and historic events,” says Biasi. “We could use Maps Engine to add articles, photography and information from National Geographic expeditions to our ocean maps. These interactive maps, which we can display in 2D or 3D, will allow people to follow along with expeditions as they unfold or retrace past expeditions.”
Frederic Kaplan of the Venice Time Machine is excited to see how this collaboration develops, though he think it will encounter one stumbling block. “It’s interesting,” he says. “It should work well for any recent maps or reconstructed maps from the past. However, maps that are more than 200 years old will be very difficult to chart directly onto Google Maps.”
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* on Mohammed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo.
** at Floridita in West Harlem.
*** at La Nieta Carmela, in the La Latina neighborhood.
Read the profile of Robin Nagle, trash anthropologist and long-time resident of New York City »
Check out Nagle’s favorite — unexpected — locations throughout New York’s five boroughs, in a gallery photographed by Ryan Lash »
Jason Sweeney’s Adelaide, Australia
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Read the profile of sound artist Jason Sweeney, and find out why he describes Adelaide as “a prototype for what a developed city in the western world could be” »
See Sweeney’s favorite spots — and hear them in recordings made just for TED — in the accompanying gallery of Adelaide, photographed by Kristin Alford »
Gabriella Gomez-Mont’s Mexico City, Mexico
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Read a profile of Gabriella Gomez-Mont’s life and work in “that beast of a city,” Mexico City »
And, see some truly fine-looking restaurants, cafes, quiet spots, museums and oases in this gallery of Mexico City, photographed by Felipe Luna »
Iñaki Romero Larrea’s Madrid, Spain
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And, see the young urbanist’s favorite places (including a great place to head for a beer at the end of a long day) in this gallery of Madrid photographed by Vanessa Gonzalez »
Khurram Siddiqi’s Lahore, Pakistan
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See the bustling streets and existing signage systems that make navigation such an issue, in a gallery of Lahore, photographed by Khurram Siddiqi »
Read the profile of David Li, and his aspirations for his flourishing makerspace in Shanghai »
And, see the business district, Pudong, the Museum of Contemporary Art and other must-see spots in the city, in a gallery of Shanghai, photographed by Lawrence Wang »
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab’s Cairo, including her thoughts on the revolution »
See images of Shehab’s treasured places in the Egyptian capital, including Tahrir Square, in a gallery of Cairo, photographed by Ohoud Saad »
Juliana Machado Ferreira’s São Paulo, Brazil
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Find out more about Juliana Machado Ferreira’s life in São Paulo, including the places she goes to find peace and quiet amid the urban bustle »
And, see some of Ferreira’s favorite places, including a cool cinema and a great place to get junk food, in a gallery of São Paulo, photographed by Alessandra Fratus »
Juliana Rotich’s Nairobi, Kenya
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Read the profile of Juliana Rotich and find out more about her life and work as a technology entrepreneur in Nairobi »
Want to pick up the best chapati in town? Fancy admiring some baby elephants? Head on over to this gallery of Nairobi, photographed by Joshua Wanyama »
Danny Squires’ Christchurch, New Zealand
Read the profile of Danny Squires, who describes living in a city suffering from earthquake-induced PTSD »
See how the city is rebuilding after the devastating earthquake of 2011, in this gallery of Christchurch, photographed by Clayton Prest »
Nurur Rahman Khan’s Dhaka, Bangladesh
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Read Nurur Rahman Khan’s description of creativity, complexity and adda in Dhaka »
And, see the accompanying gallery of photographs of Dhaka, photographed by Mohammad Tauheed »
Read the profile of Chris Downey, describing his life as a blind architect in San Francisco »
And, see the accompanying gallery of the experience of navigating San Francisco, photographed by Marla Aufmuth »
]]>From the earliest days of human exploration we’ve made progressively more accurate and sophisticated maps. Maps help us find our way around the world we live in. Maps help us get to our destination. Maps keep us from becoming lost.
But what if you have no destination? What if becoming lost is the point? Well, there’s a map for that. Lots of them, actually.
Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley: Mapping ideas worth spreading
Unconventional maps are on the mind today because today’s talk features one. TED Fellows Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley share how they created a map of the TEDx Universe — which looks a bit like an everlasting gobstopper — out of the diverse ideas expressed at TEDx events. The pair got the idea to create this map upon discovering that they had both spoken at TED conferences. They decided to use the YouTube transcripts of 24,000 TEDx talks to pinpoint the connections that exist between them. From there, they mapped the mathematical structure that underlies these ideas. Hear more about how they created this map, and how incredible it is to lose yourself in it, by watching the talk.
Here are four other maps you can thoroughly lose yourself in.
The Atlas of True Names. Have you ever heard of the Mountain by the Noisy Lake? Or traveled through the Land of the Palefaces? Or visited the town of Sibling Love? The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological origins of the names for places we see on today’s maps.
Bob Dylan’s World. Every place mentioned in every Bob Dylan song, mapped. Each pinned location contains a corresponding lyric, song and album — and is guaranteed to get a song running through your head.
Countries invaded by the British. Sir Ken Robinson, in his talk at our TED Talks Education PBS special, joked that the British have invaded every country they’ve ever visited. Was he exaggerating? This map suggests not so much.
