Diving into the Internet

Internet has become the main medium for social systems that interactively exchange ideas and opinions, generating and sharing knowledge worldwide.

This exhibit experiments on networks built from real-time data from the Internet, giving participants the feeling they are really “inside” the web, witnessing what is happening now and aiming to achieve the general objective of better understanding the processes of knowledge generation and opinion dynamics. In particular, Visitors will be invited to enter a dark room where they can interact with a network of news extracted from the on-line press.

The Observatorium project focuses on complex network dynamics in the Internet, and in particular on how blog networks, networks of concepts and topics, and networks of people are structured and co-evolve, aiming to help explaining the general knowledge generation process on the Internet.

A system of motion sensors will detect people's movements, allowing visitors to interact with the network of concepts by opening and reading texts through some stylized body movements.

Visitors will be able to open news that are being detected in real-time, discover clusters of news, identify topics and relate news. News will come from newspapers written in English, French and German languages. Visitors might interact with the English, French or German networks, or with a network integrating all news.

Moreover, within these networks composed of many interconnected and interdependent components, which grow without centralized control concerning the physics of information diffusion, visitors have also the possibility to interact with a network of interlinked research papers.

Contact: Jorge Louçã

Primary affiliation: ISCTE-IUL Lisbon University Institute
Position: Professor
City: Lisbon
Country: Portugal

Stand: 26