SourceMap is an outstanding venture sponsored by different groups within the MIT. As they state on the site: “When you invite people to an event, buy the ingredients for a recipe, or design the parts of a product, your choices have a significant impact. Some things have vast supply chains that stretch across the world while others are completely regional. Understanding the reach of our sourcing is fundamental to improving economic, social and environmental conditions.”

Sourcemap is a tool for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. The site is a social network where anyone can contribute to a shared understanding of the story behind products. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using their Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each ‘Sourcemap’ can be used to help market socially – and environmentally – conscious products and to buy carbon offsets. Supply chains published on the site can be embedded in external websites, printed onto product packaging or linked through QR codes readable by camera phones. As the site grows, suppliers will be able to contribute their products to the Sourcemap database, providing a geographic catalogue of materials and products around the world.

The images shown here are from a sourcemap of IKEA’s Sultan Alsarp bed. You might also enjoy seeing Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles. I truly hope this represents a critical business shift towards transparency and environmental awareness.

Released by Asterisq, Mentionmap is a web app for exploring your Twitter network. It allows you to discover which people you interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also an interesting way to find relevant people to follow.

The visualization runs in your browser and displays data from the Twitter API. It loads each user’s Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. The lines drawn between nodes become thicker the more users mention each other. This draws the viewer’s attention to potential discussions and interesting debates. Hovering over an edge also reveals the exact number of mentions. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter usernames into the search box.

The data is displayed using Constellation Framework – a graph visualization library for Actionscript.

PostModernNews deconstructs a collection of Twitter messages into a bag-of-words, replacing syntax with a graphic re-arrangement of terms that the reader must re-associate to assert meaning. Users can either enter particular search terms or select one of the expandable categories, e.g., Trends, Celebrities, Editorial, to get started. The interaction with the generated territory allows different behaviors. While some relationships are drawn, others are implied with boundaries, solid or porous, and others only appear when queried with the cursor.

This visualization depicts the similarities between 5,000 movies as found by an algorithm used for the Netflix Prize. Movies are represented by dots with adjacent titles. Similar movies, as determined by customer rating patterns, are connected by a line. Colors closer to red indicate a weaker similarity, and colors closer to yellow indicate a stronger similarity. Many similarly-rated movies tend to cluster around topics, themes, directors, or actors. You can see a previous version of the project here.

Comissioned by ArtAids, for the exhibition FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, Plasma is an interactive network of links and tags that belongs to a ongoing research on the topic of AIDS, from an integral and holistic point of view. Created by Santiago Ortiz and L�a Legrand, the project is still under way and welcoming further collaboration.