During the 2008 election season, a “Purple America” map made the rounds on the Internet. Instead of showing a country divided into red and blue states, the map colored each voting precinct in shades ranging, usually, between red and blue.
Moving beyond simple divisions is what also drives OpinionSpace, which launched at the end of April from the Center for New Media at the University of California at Berkeley. Ken Goldberg, a professor at the university and director of the center, says that the project was “inspired by the discussion of party identity” in the 2008 election. It shows how close a person is to like-minded people who fill out a survey on the site.
The OpinionSpace site is a “visualization of opinions,” Mr. Goldberg says. To participate, you adjust sliders to show the degree to which you agree or disagree with five political statements. Recent statements included “Torture is justifiable if it prevents a terrorist attack” and “Gasoline at $0.99 a gallon would be good for Americans.” You can also comment on an open-ended discussion question.
The visualization part comes when “we compute a ‘projection’ of answers into our opinion space, which is a ‘night sky’ metaphor” with individuals shown as stars in the sky, Mr. Goldeberg says.
OpinionSpace uses its own scoring system to place other peoples’ stars closer or farther away based on how they agree as the five “dimensions” of your slider answers. You can click on other stars to read each person’s response to the open-ended question. OpinionSpace includes “landmarks,” or the projections of where public political figures such as Nancy Pelosi might stand (or twinkle).
The site builds on an algorithm Mr. Goldberg helped develop for Jester, a joke-recommending web site.
Mr. Goldberg hopes to learn more about how opinions can be expressed, and what this could mean for an era of “participatory democracy”. He says his team is already collecting interesting ideas from the 14,000 people who have used OpinionSpace.
And furthering the cause of participatory democracy, OpinionSpace will be open-source, meaning the software code will be available for those who wish to tinker, on the SourceForge site. —Dan Turner
