First dataviz with Libviz on “Endocrine Disruption”. © CC by NC
It’s the very first prototype to which the Makery medialab is contributing, as part of the cooperation platform Artlabo. Libviz is a website to view shared and augmented favorites.
Viewing and sharing in real time one’s favorite links. Make a form of semantic hypertext readable by everyone. This is what promises the very first prototype to which the Makery medialab contributed, Libviz. This open source web platform to view favorites, supported by Artlabo, was presented last week simultaneously at Visualizar’16 at the Prado Medialab in Madrid, and at the art and science festival RIXC in Riga, Latvia.
Artlabo, French cooperation program driven by Ping (Nantes) that brings together the French structures Labomedia (Orléans), le Lieu Multiple (Poitiers), Bandit-Mages (Bourges), Champ des Possibles (Allier) and the Makery medialab (Paris), started a series of workshops a year ago around the creation of this open source web platform for the viewing of favorites libraries, Zotero, software that is directly installed in the web browser.
Zotero, open source reference management software, was developed on the initiative of the Center For history and New Media (CHNM) of the George Mason university in Washington. This small plug-in allows you to manage bibliographic data and research documents, and share favorites in a common library while retaining the rigor of academic work thanks to metadata indexed to the favorites. Artlabo set about the task of showing this link sharing work by delivering a navigation and viewing tool. A way of navigating and finding your way in a complex subject.
Viewing in real time
The team gathered around the Libviz project focused on the development of a generic tool updatable in real time for the general public to view on Internet. In a way that Libviz applies to the largest variety of favorite datasets, and starting from research subjects.
On the development side (and to make things simple), the indexation protocols in Zotero were first converted in Python language. Julien Paris then turned them all into Javascript via D3.js (Data-Driven Documents), a tool for the display of graphic and dynamic data. The website relies on a Flask open source server.
In concrete terms, the 0.3 version launched on October 1 offers a first dataviz exercise lead with the collective of artists Aliens in Green within Artlabo around endocrine disruptors. From a corpus of academic scientific articles, this mapping presents the actors and sanitary and society impacts of this controversy.
Other mappings are under testing, that concern the commons in Barcelona (Barcelona Smart City Commons), the institutional evaluation of open access, the subject of free software and open source, the media concentration in France…
Beware, it is still a prototype! Libviz will be presented during the Forum Camp of the Artlabo platform organized at the Plateforme C fablab in Nantes, from October 16-22, 2016.
Navigate in the Libviz dataviz “Endocrine Disruption”
See Libviz 0.3