Michele Mauri

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Design

Wikipedia represents an open and collaborative encyclopedic environment, and is one of the main sources of information today. The information is encoded, among other formats, in graphics and data visualizations. The source of such pieces of information is various — some are taken from governmental sources, or reports published under Creative Common...

The paper presents the preliminary results of a research aimed at designing a visual model to represent the genetic process of literary works, namely the network of texts (such as drafts, diary notes, and previously published materials) used by an author to develop a new work. In the paper, the visual model is described highlighting the main design...

The chapter introduces the topic by contextualizing, historically and conceptually, the use of visual properties to convey data and information for the built environment. It presents how design affects the visualization process, highlighting the authorial choices that influence how readers perceives information, showing why visualizations are not t...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), or controlling investments that cross national borders, is in many respects the backbone of globalization. However, a considerable part of it is composed of "paper" shell companies used for tax avoidance and other purposes. While it is possible to reconstruct chains of FDI positions, it is difficult to raise public...

In this contribution we present a didactical framework aimed at teaching design students how to use coding in support to their design process. This framework has been developed during the last four years in a course named “Creative Coding”, held in the Communication Design degree of Politecnico di Milano. The article firstly introduces the motivati...

In this paper we present the design of research protocol diagrams as a didactic tool in communication design education. The goal is to teach critical aspects of dataset design processes to design students. The context is a five-month course of Data Visualization addressed to master students in Communication Design. For the last five years, the cour...

Purchases, conversations, access to information, music and movies: more and more of our online life is mediated by complex algorithms that are designed to make the experience of the Web customized and more “personal”. These algorithms can process an amount of heterogeneous data that would take enormous resources for the human mind to cope with, and...

In the modern 'data society', designers play a key role in the creation of artefacts that mediate our access to data and information. These artefacts include data visualisations and interfaces. Within this context, there is a growing risk of design educators training professionals who are indifferent to, or unaware of, the political power of the de...

In this paper we present Top Tom, a digital platform whose goal is to provide analytical and visual solutions for the exploration of a dynamic corpus of user‐generated messages and media articles, with the aim of i) distilling the information from thousands of documents in a low‐dimensional space of explainable topics, ii) cluster them in a hierarc...

RAWGraphs is an open source web application for the creation of static data visualisations that are designed to be further modified. Originally conceived for graphic designers to provide a series of tasks not available with other tools, it evolved into a platform that provides simple ways to map data dimensions onto visual variables. It presents a...

Despite the high usage of diagrams and images in Wikipedia, as well as across all Wikimedia projects, few studies have been conducted on the role of visual contents within the online encyclopedia and on the collaborative creation of diagrams. This article describes research that brought a group of designers into Wikipedia, with the goal of explorin...

Data produced by humans and machines is more and more heterogeneous, visual, and location based. This availability inspired in the last years a number of reactions from researchers, designers, and artists that, using different visual manipulations techniques, have attempted at repurposing this material to add meaning and design new perspectives wit...

The Field Guide to Fake News explores the use of digital methods to trace the production, circulation and reception of "fake news" online. This document is a sample comprising of the first three chapters of the field guide. These chapters cover recipes for tracing the circulation of "fake news" on Facebook and the web, as well as its tracker signat...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize digitized and digital information as well as a key contemporary digital heritage endeavor in itself. Capitalizing on this dual nature of the project, this article introduces Wikipedia as a digital gateway to and site of active engagement with cultural he...

Data visualisation has become one of the most relevant DH topics, due to the advent of Big Data in Humanities research practices, and to the need to make complex statistical analyses accessible to users without a technical background. Although several visualisation libraries, such as d3.js, are now freely available online and are relatively easy to...

Emerging approaches in social sciences and new media studies involve inquiry into social issues via the web. By collecting, analysing and visualising digital traces (i.e. posts, tweets, comments), a " issue map " can be created in order to make visible and understandable the network of the actors involved and their position in any public debate. Dr...

‘Public access to publicly funded research’ has been one of the rallying calls of the global open access movement. Governments and public institutions around the world have mandated that publications supported by public funding sources should be publicly accessible. Publishers are experimenting with new models to widen access. Yet financial flows u...

This paper presents digital methods for city analytics, applied to the mapping and activation of an urban area in the city of Amsterdam called the Knowledge Mile. Firstly, we map companies registered in the area and analyse their connections through on-line hyperlinking. Secondly, we use Instagram, Panoramio and Google Search data to map most-share...

Controversy mapping is a teaching and research method derived from the Science and Technology Studies and meant to explore and represent modern sociotechnical issues. Striving to make the intricacy of scientific debate readable for a larger public, controversy mapping is trapped in a classic simplicity/complexity trade-­‐off: how to respect the ric...

Controversy mapping is a teaching and research method derived from the Science and Technology Studies and meant to explore and represent modern sociotechnical issues. Striving to make the intricacy of scientific debate readable for a larger public, controversy mapping is trapped in a classic simplicity/complexity trade-­‐off: how to respect the ric...

When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to m...

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article,...

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article,...

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories. Each of the maps focuses on one issue in the adaptation debate and provides.The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalistsl...

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories. Each of the maps focuses on one issue in the adaptation debate and provides.The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalistsl...

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. In Wikipedia, one of the most prominent examples of collaboration online, conflict is mediated by both policy and software, and conflicts often reflect larger societal debates. Contropedia is a platform for the analysis and visualization of...

Digital archives metadata suggest a rich and complex system of relationships between the different properties of archived items, which is often not properly represented. Lomen is a research project aimed at exploiting the richness of digital archives, stitching up the relationships between entities and providing visual access to the system. This pa...

L’utilizzo di metodologie provenienti dalla information visualization nella progettazione di interfacce a collezioni digitali è una pratica che si sta consolidando negli ultimi anni (Hilton, 2010), con l’obiettivo di superare l’accesso puntuale ai singoli elementi a vantaggio di una visione complessiva dei contenuti. Allo stato attuale queste metod...