To perceive other viewpoints or to see things in new ways

Thanks. I found a great reflection for those whose stream of consciousness lies in information visualization.***

See Diane Levin's blog for her visualization on this article:

Back to the future: South American indigenous Aymara people have mirror-image understanding of time,

One of the benefits mediation affords to participants is the opportunity to shift their perspective--to perceive other viewpoints or to see things in new ways. [And much more about this story on Back to the future... ]

See also blogs that are busy with this concept

The Punch Line:
Just-in-case you thought the world is only in the Northern Hemisphere, please bear in mind, there is a Southern Hemisphere, as well.
See a Tamil context of this time (one of oldest language, culture, and civilization in India):
As a native Tamil speaker, I find this fascinating, because we have very similar linguistic references to time. Consider these Tamil words and sentences ... continue And, you will find, herein, a comment from another Tamil scholar attesting this historicity of Back to the future from the Tamil point-of-view.

And, just-in-time if you already have all this understanding, please proceed and visualize something different, but from an East-Asian cultural context. Click here: The Sensor Clock: Please Keep Jokes to a Minimum

***UPDATE: A coincidence - After I published this reflection, I came across another blog, whose title is: Agelessbonding, and whose subtitle is: What I see from where I am and how I see it. Continue reading from Agelessbonding [Note: this blog exists, almost, since three years: 10/01/2003]

Carl Jung's Conceptualization About Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, Intuition

How close is this to our notion of Information Visualization?

I just came across a Web site that deals with the Jungian notions of "The Functions: Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, Intuition"

This Jungian article comes with a title: Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Jung, [published by Institute of Transpersonal Psychology • 1069 E. Meadow Circle Palo Alto, CA 94303]
The article deals with themes such as,
The Attitudes: Introversion and Extraversion
The Functions: Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, Intuition
The Unconscious
Archetype
The Ego
The Persona
The Shadow
The Self
Symbols
Psychological Growth: Individuation
Evaluation
Recent Developments: Jung's Influence
References

An extract:

One of Jung's greatest contributions to psychology is his theory of type. Jung found that different people think, feel, and experience the world in fundamentally different ways. His type theory is a powerful tool to help us understand how people function.

Jung identified four fundamental psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each function may be experienced in an introverted or an extraverted fashion. Generally, one of the functions is more conscious, developed, and dominant. Jung called this the superior function. It operates out of the dominant attitude (either extraversion or introversion). One of the other three remaining functions is generally deep in the unconscious and less developed. Jung called this the inferior function. see full text

What I think is Information Visualization as a process, technique, thought and action is so close, in theory and in practice. But how close, or how far. Any comments from the Gurus of Information visualizaiton?

P.S. Librarians, I was trying to find more info on books about Jungian connections with Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. And, in this process Google led me to this Web site, and in fact there is much on the Multifaith context in this visualization of the threads that connect the East and the West.

My related post:

Toxicity in the library workplace - a survey

Emotional Communication Interface - Revisited

What is the True Color of the World Wide Web?

It is the dark and light web! indeed, there is much that escapes the Google:

Content on the Web that is not found in most search engine results, because it is stored in a database rather than on HTML pages. Viewing such content is accomplished by going to the Web site's search page and typing in specific queries. LexiBot was the first search engine to actually make individual queries to each searchable database that it finds (see LexiBot). Also known as the "invisible Web." Contrast with surface Web.continue reading

Some call it underground Web. See Yahoo Answers

What Color Should Your Blog Be??

Visualizing the Innernet or Visual Display of the Website's Infostructure

Show, don't tell, is the bottom line here.
Websites have their own faces, features, facets, and factbites. Many are however not visualized. Interestingly, businesses and communication portals are now looking (not just at the surface and beyond), even at the inner self. This soul searching is good and hope it lasts longer. By the way, I am not alone in inviting attention to the Innernet (no spelling error) in a material world***
What follows is a visual of my two blogs' (or Website's) infostructure (not infrastructure, for a difference click here). Click at any of the images, given below and you can visualize the true colors of the content.


Image on the right: Multifaith Hall of Fame of the 21st century
Image on the left: Blog As A Teaching Tool
The meaning of the colors in the above images is well stated by the author of aharef. See the following:

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Teblog of David Tebbutt for the information visualization tool, viz., Aharef's website-mapper.
I am amzaed by the way Ted has visualized this graphics: Website Structure (beautifully) Revealed [details]. His tell tale is:

As a way of highlighting areas for improvement, this is brilliant. It is also quite hypnotic to watch the image evolve.

Ted has identified another source: Aharef’s Wikipedia site-map. Click and Visualize

Incidentally, he was inspired by a master visualizer, Guillaume du Gardier. I envy Guillaume du Gardier for his PR and Communication skills. His blog is loaded (I mean it in a positive sense) with all types of graphics, images, and visuals [view here].

A word about other graphics and applications that pre-date Aharef's website-mapper.
Knowledge managers have been adopting this sense-making approach in their own ways. See Lennart Björneborn's doctoal work,
The Corona model with examples of link paths and reachability structures between different graph components in a web space (modified after the Bow-Tie model by Broder et al. 2000) [Details]

~~~~Links are for use – the very essence of hypertext;
~~~~Every surfer his or her link – the rich diversity of links across topics and genres;
~~~~Every link its surfer – ditto;
~~~~Save the time of the surfer – visualizing web clusters and small-world shortcuts;
~~~~The Web is a growing organism
quoted in PhD dissertation in webometrics:
Small-World Link Structures across an Academic Web Space - a Library and Information Science Approach.

P.S. "I didn't say a word. They did." Thus Spake Feroze Thank you Mr. Feroze for giving me this message in seven short words (amidst your thousand worded blog). You are a creative visualizer (see his blog: my1000words). Thank you also for letting me learn that visuals speak on their own (we don't need to always use a 1000 words).
----
Similar Resources:
*** There are many more in this stream to give you such an insight:

Cover story of the May / June 2006 AIIM E-Doc Magazine, has a lead article on Be Serene: Channel you inner records manager, detials

Centre for Spirituality at Work "Fostering good karma a touchy subject; Spirituality is the 'last frontier' of workplace enightenment, but Wallace Immen finds interest in exploding, May 24, 2006 [You may find these articles of interest: An article from the www.Spirituality.com website about our Founding Director, Sherry Connolly, MBA, MDiv, DMin (cand.)]

Putting Reflection into Gear, BY : John Baldoni, [ON LEADERSHIP COMMUNICATION] 06/28/2006

Vertical and tacit: Multifaith and Knowledge Management in Perspective, details

Labyrinths, Sacred Geometry, Innernet & Visualization, details

See also: Richmond, Lewis. Work as a spiritual practice : a practical Buddhist approach to inner growth and satisfaction on the job (Broadway Books, c1999)

Visual Signatures and Information Visualization

What is a visual signature?

Is it your picture, you leave with your comment?
Is it your comments, per se?
Is it your logo that you carry?
Is it your name plate that is visual?
Is it your brand that is visible?
Is it the stamp (captured by the web traffic log) that you leave after your visit ?

An answer, to the above question, could be any one, or all of the above.

What the experts in the field of information visualization say about it? I am searching. But, as of now, I have no way to quote or cite them. [Google, if you wish Lets proceed.

Read the following extracts, and you may be able to visualize the true colors of visual signature:

I am not who I am, I am what I do (online...)

We are adding a new dimension to everyone's online persona: what you look like, your "visual signature". As for all the other dimensions (email, phone number, credit card number...), I believe that noone should ever be able to learn anything about me by just knowing what I look like (and vice versa !) more...

INTERFACE DESIGN

Graphic design and visual "signature" graphics are not used simply to enliven Web pages - graphics are integral to the user's experience with your site. In interactive documents graphic design cannot be separated from issues of interface design. Read further...

What about Signature?? (requires you to sign in, or take Ecademy Membership to read all comments)

The themes discussed include: Visualization supports Communication, What about signaure?, etc.

Visual thinking practice: Finding your visual voice, by dave gray

... Your visual voice is that intangible which makes your sketches, doodles, and whiteboard scribbles uniquely yours and no one else's. You could think of it as your visual signature. Here's a way to discover it. Continue to visualize

Gemplus? Lookthatup, By Fritz Nelson

...The software can assess color, shape and texture using a visual signature of the image. The technology uses an image analyzer that "enhances, indexes, recognizes and retrieves images." Keep reading...

Dynamic Signatures, AQStats.com

A signature graphic that is compatible with the Battleon Forums as well as phpBB forums. The signature displays the statistics of a character in AdventureQuest. A JavaScript-based signature creator can be used as a visual signature editor. The signature can be created by hand, using the following URL format:
http://sig.aqstats.com/font:color;line:(color|none);bg:(color|image|transparent);sigtype:style/characterID.(png|gif) Read further...

you may be redirected from Visual Signature Verification to the software used for Signature Verification

Using Mnemonic TechniquesAs Part Of Pictorial InterfaceFor Self-identification Of Illiterate Villagers, by Dinesh S. Katre details in pdf file

Anyways. If you are not happy with the above, let me know, I will continue my research. Any comments?

Visual Calendar and Information Visualization Contextualized

What is a visual calendar?
It is simply a visual show or snapshot of what have you on the calendar.

Sample Images Google Yahoo AlltheWeb MSN

There are many ways (as well as tools) to add visual content to calendars. In the following is a list of resources on the subject.

Enabling rich human-agent interaction for a calendar scheduling agent, by Andrew Faulring and Brad A. Myers, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems archive, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2005 Details. [ABSTRACT: The RhaiCAL system provides novel visualizations and interaction techniques for interacting with an intelligent agent, with an emphasis on calendar scheduling. After an agent interprets natural language containing meeting information, a user can easily correct mistakes using RhaiCAL's clarification dialogs, which provide the agent with feedback to improve its performance. When an agent proposes actions to take on the user's behalf, it can ask the user to confirm them. RhaiCAL uses novel visualizations to present the proposal to the user and allow them to modify the proposal, and informs the agent of the user's actions in a manner that supports long-term learning of the user's preferences. We have designed a high-level XML-based language that allows an agent to express its questions and proposed actions without mentioning user interface details, and that enables RhaiCAL to generate high-quality user interfaces].

Developing calendar visualizers for the information visualizer, Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology archive, Proceedings of the 7th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, by Jock D. Mackinlay, et al. 1994 Details. [ABSTRACT: The increasing mass of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design and implement visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral Calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphics techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Time Lattice is formed by aligning a collection of 2D calendars. 2D translucent shadows provide views and interactive access to the resulting complex 3D object. The paper focuses on how these visualizations were developed. The Spiral Calendar, in particular, has gone through an entire cycle of development, including design, implementation, evaluation, revision and reuse. Our experience should prove useful to others developing user interfaces based on advanced graphics].

Greg Judelman. Knowledge Visualization, Information Visualization, Problems with Current Information Interfaces and more...

Calendaring websites reviewed, Journal of Samantha, May 31, 2006

When in doubt, Ask the Expert:
Edward Tufte: Ask ET forum - Topic: Visual Calendar

Applications Side***:

Give your website visitors a Visual Calendar of your events, not just text announcements: mini-calendar

Sked Visual Calendar [Sked is an effort to develop a visual calendar/scheduling program with the primary interface being text-based (i.e. it runs on a terminal). There seems to be a plethora of strictly graphical calendar programs available, but a relative dearth of text-based ones. Sked attempts to fill that void. The interface principles of Sked are very similar to those of Mutt and Vim, primarily emphasizing efficiency and speed. Indeed, many of the features of those programs will be copied wholesale. Anyone who uses and enjoys Vim or Mutt should feel at home using Sked.

Visual Calendar Planner v5.0 Shareware

See also from my other blog: Multifaith Calendars - Visualize the Festivals, Feasts, Fasts, Festoons, etc

***Disclaimer: These tools are not tested for quality, applicability and effectiveness. Try it yourself.