"How does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data - far more than they could read in a lifetime - what does that mean for research?" (Manovich, 2009)
Z Lab is a research lab founded by Fan Xiang from Tsinghua University and Shunshan (Sam) Zhu from Cloud Dynamics Inc. in 2015. Z Lab focuses on data visualization of complicated social behaviors and collective activities, dynamic media design and digital arts. Although data producing, collecting, and sharing have become much easier nowadays, robust methods and effective visual tools are still needed to observe and explore the nature of complex activities.
The goal of our research is to exploit the potentials of data visualization and information design and provide innovative and engaging visual artifacts to enable researchers, scholars and commercial companies to build solid arguments. By rearranging numeric data, reinterpreting qualitative information, locating information geographically, and building visual taxonomies, we can develop a visualized world to describe and unveil the hidden connections of complex systems. Our visualizations are open, inclusive, and preserve multiple interpretations of complex phenomena.
The purpose of our recent study is to understand the current ideology of China by visualizing a great quantity of images from official art archives. Check out methodology and the preliminary results of our recent two projects, "Award Puzzle" and "A Palette of CCTV's Chinese New Year Gala".
Z Lab is open to collaborating with other researchers, institutions and businesses, to get better understanding of how data visualization can help scientists, engineers and businesses.