Since I moved to the Boston area I have been attacked by information. I am both new to the US and a job searcher thus every piece of information is interesting and crucial.
Here are some examples: bus and subway schedule and routes, grocery shops and prices, internet sites of potential companies for employment, federal internet sites, interesting HCI information, people’s names, new words in English, cool places in Boston, ATM code, banking system, how to get from here to there, place to have a haircut, new monetary, schools for master degree, place to get a good Guinness, people that can help me, how to charge my Charlie card, where to see a movie, inches Fahrenheit foot and miles, and the list goes on.
These fractions of information are exciting and overwhelm at the same time.
My first lab project is to organize this information.
The first type of information is physical: city structure.
When we first arrived in Tel Aviv I was terrified, the city looked so big and strange. It took me about a year to feel comfortable, to know where to find things I like and how to get from one place to another, and then I didn’t want to leave.
I made two cognitive maps, one of Tel Aviv and one of the Boston area. These maps represent my physical knowledge of the city, my use of space. I’m going to update the Boston map every month and compare the maps to each other. The maps represent individual and temporary knowledge; they change from one day to another.
One more clarification-the Boston map shows Boston, Cambridge and Brookline- about 5000 hectares (12300 acres), while the Tel Aviv map is much smaller in scale, it shows about 75% of its territory, approximately 3900 hectares (9600 acres).
These two maps can reveal some secrets about me; the most obvious is my means of transportation. In Tel Aviv I used to walk and ride my bike, so
the map is created by long lines that connect to each other. In Boston (Cambridge) I ride the T, and the map is created by dots, as if I’m bouncing around from one place to another.
The second type of information is metaphysical.
This type contains information that has to do with the fact that I started a new chapter in my life; I came to a place with new people and a new culture.
Organizing is basically the action of dividing, so same as before, I divided the information to four groups. In order to represent the information as mathematical data I strained my brain for half a day (math is not my strong side) and came with a very simple equation.
1. Number of uses- the number of times I use this piece of information, if I didn’t really use it- it gets the value 0.1. (In the people group number of use means
the number of times I interacted with those people)
2. Number of days in the US- I will continue to update this table every month, so number of days in the US will always be in increments of 30.
3. Constant- has the value of 1, 2 or 3 and it represents a capacity of information that specific information object contain. 3 being the highest, 1 the lowest.
4. E- is the amount of effect the specific information object has on me, and it is represented by the simple equation:
E=
(Number of uses/Number of days in the US)*Constant*100.
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The numeric information is represented as a radar graph that helps me compare the influence every information group has on me in a specific month, for example you can see that I interact less in the second month with the new monetary, because I got my debit and credit card.
That’s it about information for today, I’ll be very happy to read your comments about this post: subject, maps, graphs and equation, or whatever you want to write about.
Gila
2 comments:
Hi Gilgul
this is very interesting and such an original way to look at this information.
the firs assosiation I had about it was the spatio-temporal maps of the memory in the human brain. i know very little about it but if i remamber correctly, ther are various functional areas in the brain and different kinds of information are being stored in different location.
maybe you can read about it and make some use of that additional information.
anyway, you are so clever!
Very cool graphs and choice of information. Are you familiar with Edward Tufte? You might find his Visual Display of Quantitative Information interesting.
This makes me wonder, is ALL information in its essence quantatative? Even qualitative information (for example how experiences or interactions with others feel) can be assigned a number and thus become quantitative.
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