The project Maps of View is an interactive map application aimed to map the global web presence of countries/areas in different language contexts. My hypothesis is that Web information might be different when the language context is different. Does the information look different when we Google the same topic in English and Chinese language? Do we read the same amount of information about Africa all over the world?

Three data sets were collected: geographical size of countries/area, the number of Google search results for the English names of countries/areas, and Google search results for the Chinese names of the same countries/areas.

A proof-of-concept prototype was build, using Macromedia Director (for graphic user interface) and PHP + mysql(for database structure and data mining).

See the Demo [Shockwave Plugin Required]

Context

The project was developed during the Dynamic visual design seminar, at Media Lab, Taik, Helsinki in 2006. The seminar was taught by Lily Diaz. The prototype was build with the help of two heroes: Erirk Fatland and Rasmus Vuori

The visualization compares the percentage of countries/areas in each language, showing for example that the term Zhong Guo ("China" in Chinese) gets comporatively more search results than the term "China" does in English. This is obvious - but "Maps of View" also reveals the unexpected - such as the much larger presence of most African countries in the English web than in the Chinese web.

In the prototype, animated transitions between the datasets was used to emphasize the differences between those datasets. As the map transition, the users can clearly see some countries expending, pushing away the neighborer countries, while others shrink to almost disappear from the map. By seeing this changing process, users can not only SEE the difference but also FEEL it.