Jonathan Harris: Stories That Come Alive

CELEBRATING EXPERIMENTATION

“In Universe, as in reality, everything is connected. No event happens in isolation. No company exists in a vacuum. No person lives alone. Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today’s world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.” –- Jonathan Harris

Jonathan Harris is a young man with a unique angle on life. He designs systems that explore and explain the fabric of our human world by combining computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling.

Harris has made projects about anonymity, human desire and emotion, language, modern mythology, news and science. Universe is one such project Harris conceived in conjunction with Daylife, a company dedicated to creating interesting ways to explore and experience the world of news. Its amazing database of real time global news information is what powers Universe.

Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology. It is a Java applet that opens up on your browser with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move.

Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, an organisation, a team, a place. Moving your cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else flying into orbit.

Based on the chosen path of the viewer, Universe presents the most salient stories, statements and snapshots, as found in global news coverage from thousands of sources. Through this process of guided discovery, patterns start to emerge. Certain stories show up again and again as certain people participating and interacting on the Web start to shape the news.

What is unique about Universe is that it is a system that displays the spirit of the age and its society or zeitgeist of information for arbitrarily defined data sets. This means that the experience of using Universe is different for each person, based on his or her interests.

The applet offers several interesting ways to specify the nature of the data set to be examined. In this way, Universe can be asked to reveal the zeitgeist of any date, concept, person, company, organisation, etc. Once a universe of data has been specified, the system then presents that universe through nine different stages.

Harris’ Universe captures the world’s expression and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the Internet and a clearer sense of the emotional world of the Web. With particular attention to the human condition, Universe trolls the Internet to find out what we’re all feeling and looking for.

If Google provides a skeletal infrastructure for search, Universe provides its soul. In my opinion, it is a remarkable art form that collects stories. And now, because of Harris’ innovation, the Web’s secret stories are revealed.

To learn more about how conversations and stories published on the Web can empower charities, schools and nonprofits, please visit:

http://karlquirino.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/why-converations-and-stories-matter

To learn more about what the author of this blog does, please click on this link.