One of the areas of investigation for my PhD project revolves around spatial user interfaces and connected to this the concept of spatial hypertext. I will be writing in more detail about this however there is little that seems to have advanced in this regard since the mid 2000’s and so I would like to pin down some more current and interesting examples. A key thing is that a spatial interface is not to be confused with a concept map, although there are similarities, a spatial interface is a way to arrange collections of different objects and draw connections between them visually and spatially. I am concerned with a thinking tool to help work out relational information design. Here is a piece on information design I previously wrote.
Two keys texts are the following;
- Marshall, C.C. & Frank M Shipman, I., 1999. Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links. pp.1–5.
- Bernstein, M., 2013. Can We Talk about Spatial Hypertext?, pp.1–10.
However what I am keen to gather in the first instance is more examples of spatial interfaces. Here are my starters.
- Aquanet
- VIKI
- Tinderbox
- Nuclino
- Graph Commons
Please join the discussion here and post any interesting spatial interfaces.
As an aside, Frode Hegland in his web science PhD is also undertaking some work in this field with what he calls liquid views. This is an interactive way to work with a text document as a researcher.
