Dealing with Huge Amounts of Information

28 Apr 1998 18:58

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Facts don't do what I want them to

Limits of human attention; filtering; searching; broad-catch; information overload (does it exist?); information underload ("everything I know is wrong!"); sensory overload; visual display; effects of visual displays on the thoughts of their users (e.g., do astronomers come to think that Saturn really does have the colors they assign to different UV frequencies?); use of senses other than sight. Do the practices of detector electronics suggest any general strategies? Simulation.

See:
• Stewart Brand, The Media Lab
• Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality [Early history of quantification]
• David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds
• Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data [Review]
• Metropolis and Rota (eds.), A New Era in Computation
• The Onion, Congress Passes Freedom from Information Act
• Edward R. Tufte [How to make graphics which are actually worth botthering with]
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  • Visual Explanations

To read:
• A. Capocci, F. Slanina and Y.-C. Zhang, "Filtering information in a connected network," cond-mat/0207362 [An interesting problem, even if it does not "introduce a new kind of information theory"]
• Stephen Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium
• Gregory Kramer (ed.), Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces
• National Research Council, Massive Data Sets
• Pickover (ed.), Frontiers of Scientific Visualization
• Tufte, Envisioning Information
• John Willinsky, Technologies of Knowing: A Proposal for the Human Sciences
• Richard Zippel, Electronic Notebooks

Too much information
Running through my brain
Too much information
Driving me insane

(Alright, so that's the Police, not T. Heads. So sue me.)