Related Work
Our proposed work differs from existing work of information visualization, information retrieval, and new online chat environments in several ways:
Collage not Geometry
Firstly, most information visualization work (cf., Card, MacKinlay, Schneiderman, 1999) attempts to render large amounts of data as either a graph or as a set of points in a Cartesian space (i.e., within a continuous, gridded manifold). We are attempting to render our envisioned spaces as a collage using techniques of montage, juxaposition and faktura. Some net.art has employed this alternative (notably the work of Mark Napier and Andruid Kern), but prior work has mostly relied on rearranging or reediting images found one or more websites.
People not Documents
Secondly, while most textual and visual interfaces to information retrieval systems (e.g., search engines) illustrate the relationships between a set of search terms and the documents contained in a database, the focus of the Translation Map system will be on relationships between people. While some existing chatware provides users with a 3D, animated "body" (e.g., Active Worlds) or a 2D, abstract geometrically-abstract representation (e.g., Chat Circles of Donath et al., 1999), these existing virtual "bodies" do not represent a user's body of writings in the manner we are proposing here. Moreover, these existing systems employ a very different set of aesthetics (non-collage, "realistic," or Cartesian-geometric) than the look we are designing for the Translation Map.
Interstices not Utopias
Thirdly, efforts to promote online community have been devoted to the production of online utopias, places online where participants can meet and exchange views and information. These utopias take the form of websites, online 3D worlds, newsgroups, email lists, and FTP archives and libraries. However, very little work has been done to faciliate and visualize movement -- translation -- between these "utopias." (A very small amount of work in this direction has been accomplished by Marc Smith and Becca Xiong in their visualization of Usenet newsgroup cross-posting activity; see netscan.research.microsoft.com). We intend to identify a number of existing online "places" (e.g., a set of Yahoo newsgroups like the one devoted to Indian nationals living in Kyoto, the set devoted to Brazilian and Portugese-speaking inhabitants of Boston, etc.) and then build an interstitual space to connect and facilitate participants' movements between these existing, online places. We are now discussing possible joint work with Professor Toru Ishida at the University of Kyoto in order to accomplish a closer coupling of Japanese and Southeast Asian focussed sites with U.S. sites (see http://ice2002.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ice2002/index.html). We envision a possible parallel connection with the MIT-Asian Media Lab in India (we are both alums of the MIT Media Lab).
