anthony mattox new media art & design

World Stem Cell Map

I’ve been working for a while on this project with Stem Cell Resources for the new cell exhibit at the Maryland Science Center. The exhibition, including the Stem Cell Map and some other fun interactive works, opened yesterday and was received very well. If you’re in Baltimore its worth checking out. Developing this project has a been a great opportunity to do some great educational work with some great people. I enjoy being able to maintain a connection with the sciences despite focusing myself on art, and I always love creating data visualizations.

The Map is scripted in Actionscript 3 and takes all the data from an xml file exported from a spreadsheet making it easy to update. The research is broken down into three categories and each location is colored accordingly and scaled based on the number of facilities. It’s displayed on a large touchscreen in the exhibit and will also soon be online.

In the installation people can zoom in on countries and states and navigate around the map by dragging it. Categories can be hidden to get a better view of where different types of research. There are also four different styles of visualization to choose from: color blending, bar graph, and rectangular and concentric area graphs.

Martin Mick and myself in front of the display at the Maryland Science Center. Martin invested a lot into the project building the database for the map.