March 7, 2007

Needed: A Better Way to Visualize Dance Videos

The number of dance videos on the Internet is proliferating like crazy - this is a great development. But there is, for the most part, no convenient or easy way to find:

1) the dance videos that are of interest to you (e.g., show me specific types of Flamenco dance videos),

2) good quality dance videos, and

3) links to similar or related dance videos

Yes, you can go to YouTube and search for videos and link to similar videos. But how often do you really find what you're looking for? Most of the videos you'll find through this type of search won't be that good or interesting - at least that's what happens to me.

And even when I do find interesting videos on blogs and other sources, there's no easy way to find related videos that I'll find worth watching.

So I think that the dance community needs a better way to rate, organize and visualize dance videos for all styles and forms of dance.

Here are some initial thoughts on how we might create such a visualization framework:

I came across this online brainstorming application called Bubble.us [via Mashable]. Here's a screen shot of a sample brainstorming session generated with Bubble.us. Click this image to see a larger picture:

If you experiment with Bubble.us, you'll see that it's pretty easy to create boxes and draw lines connecting different ideas.

I think this type of brainstorming visualization might be a good starting point for dance. If you take Salsa dancing, for example, there are many different styles of Salsa that are connected to each other in different ways. So you need a flexible tool for linking these styles and showing their interconnections.

I came across this video of "Zouk" salsa dancing on the Wandering Salsero blog. Art Williams says it's probably related to Cuban Salsa. I think you would need a brainstorming-style application to show how this "Zouk" style is related to other Salsa dancing styles around the globe. Here's the "Zouk" video:

A related visualization tool would be a search engine such as Quintura [via Read/WriteWeb]. When you conduct searches with Quintura, the results are displayed in a visual cluster format so that you can see the connections among related terms. As you drill down through these related terms, the results are updated in the right-hand column. Here's an example of a search I did for "dance, ballet and classes." Click on this image to see full-size screen capture:

A different way to represent dance styles and their relationships could be through a more structured approach such as a genealogical tree such as that offered by Geni [via The Next Net]. I think this structure would impose too much of a straight jacked because dance styles and forms are much more fluid. But what I think is worthwhile about genealogical trees is that it's time-based and it may offer ideas about how to view dance connections in terms of how different dance forms from earlier decades and centuries influenced the dances of today. Here's a screen shoot of Geni from The Next Net:

And finally, you'll find three visual examples of representing connections - in this case online social connections - in a 2006 post on the RP Thoughts blog. In the third example, you'll see social connections in the form of linked webpages where the most popular websites are closer to the center of the image (this image comes from a service that is no longer active). Here's the screen shot of this visualization:

So there's a number of possible ways to visualize the connections between and among dance videos and styles, there are different ways to visualize which videos are the most popular and different approaches to searching for these videos.

By combining these capabilities a range of new possibilities are created for browsing for, searching for and exploring different styles of dance. Imagine combining the last image above (the screen shot of many websites encircling a website in the middle with the Quintura search results. The result would be that you could click on any one video, which would then become centered in the display and you would instantly see how all of the other videos connected to the one you just selected. Then, you could continue navigating this flexible visual tree of interconnected dance videos.

Then you could add the capabilities of the Bubble.us brainstorming software and build your own layer of connections among any subset of videos. You could save your personalized layer, and you as well as others could then return to your layer to explore it or build upon it.

Then a time-based visualization tool could be incorporated - inspired by Geni, the genealogical software - to generate a new viewing angle that displayed all connections and dance videos based upon the influence of different styles on each other over decades or centuries. This type of visualization approach would probably require a 3D component.

But for this model for visualizing dance videos and their interconnections to really work, one more capability would be needed and that would be the "trust" and or "friend" factor.

As large numbers of people contribute to this visualization project, there would be some great opportunities to explore dance videos in new ways. But this completely public version has the downside that you may not trust the judgment of everybody who contributes to this project. What you'll probably want is a way to only see the visualizations of dance videos either created by your friends or by people who have been rated very highly by other community members.

For example, you might create a list of 100 friends who contribute to this project. At any time, you can choose to view this visualization of dance videos only in terms of the contributions made by your friends.

In terms of "trust," there's probably a way to implement a Technorati filtering tool that lets you view blog results based upon the "authority" of the blogger. Take a look at the search results for "dance." You'll see toward the top of the page that there is a pull-down window where you can select "any authority," "a little authority, "some authority" or "a lot of authority." If you choose the most restricted category "a lot of authority," you'll see fewer results but these results should, in theory, be more valuable. "Authority," in the case of Technorati, is an indication of how many bloggers link to your blog. It's assumed - whether right or not - that if you have more links from fellow bloggers, then you are more trusted.

So that's the beginning of my dance visualization project.

Trackback Pings