This is one of the more interesting projects that I have come across as, in addition to the fairly typical network diagrams, it uses these amoeba-like structures to visualize information.

There are a number of other examples on this site as well including the more typical network diagram. In essence, Marco’s team has developed a software tool called “ATLAS” that lets a user list bibliographic resources and access them through many different maps and representations. It’s application beyond bibliographic information is pretty obvious.

In the author’s own words:

This website aims to present the results of the ongoing research on a cartographic approach to the representation of knowledge in its present configurations.

The aim of the research is to extend the cartographic metaphor beyond visual analogy, and to expose it as a narrative model and tool to intervene in complex, heterogeneous, dynamic realities, just like those of human geography. The map, in this context, is not only a passive representation of reality but a tool for the production of meaning. The map is thus a communication device: a mature representation artefact, aware of its own language and its own rhetoric, equipped with it its own tools, languages, techniques and supports. A model that recovers the narrative abilities of pre-scientific maps and presents itself not as a mere mimetic artefact, but as a poetic and political tool.

The map as narration is thus the expression of a communicative purpose. Just like a text, the map makes selections on reality, distorts events, classifies and clarifies the world in order to selections better tell a particular aspect of a territory, an event, a space. When used with malice, it can hide, conceal, falsify or diminish a reality through the construction of an ideological discourse, in which the communicative aims are hidden to the user. In this context, the term ‘map’ is a synonym of visual narration of space: a cultural artefact created by an author to describe a space according to an objective.

The map as a tool appears instead as a means that enables the user to reach an otherwise unattainable goal. It allows not only to do things better, more efficiently, but also to create new realities. As an instrument, the map expects a user using it to achieve an end, and similarly a designer, who must ensure that the structure of the instrument is as suited as possible for the achievement of the planned tasks.

In all, this is an interesting project that all of us should keep our eyes on.