Phase 1
In the first part of the course, students find, collect and visualize structured data from reliable sources to frame the internet from various perspectives, providing a comprehensive overview of how it works, how it's used and its history through the decades.
The results are a collection of ten printed visualizations, one per group, tackling the complex shape and nature of the internet.
Since it first launched in 2007 Google Street View (GSV) has managed to capture over sixteen million kilometres of Street View imagery across eighty-three countries. Through the visualisation, Group 1 aims to represent the percentage of pictures’ coverage by googling from Italy a certain area of the world.
Today all the precious personal data released on the Web is turned into huge sources of income: the so-called “data economy”. Group 2 aims to make people reflect on the importance of protecting their data, since its loss could have negative economical and emotional impact.
Internet access is not equally distributed across the whole world. Through the visualisation, Group 3 shows how populations of 88 countries, classified into 10 macro-areas, whose populations have to overcome different types of obstacles to get online.
An 'e-Wallet' is an online service that allows one party to make electronic transactions with another party. Through the visualisation, Group 4 provides to show the variety of companies present in the market in 2019 as if they were part of a planetary system.
Almost every user accesses content on the internet through a browser. But how secure are they? Through the visualisation, Group 5 provides a brief history of security vulnerabilities’ number in browsers throughout history.
With the development of the Internet, the networking types of home video game consoles have continued to iterate. Group 6 shows with this visualisation how game consoles have evolved from offline only to online.
In order to better understand the trend of spam email around the world, Group 7 designs this visualisation comparing the top 20 spam sending countries in 2010 and 2020.
The internet satellites scenario is about to change quickly, with companies such as SpaceX, Telesat, and OneWeb building fleets very close to earth. Group 8, through their visualisation, explores and maps the outer side of the internet, aiming to analyse how the space is occupied, by whom and for which purpose.
Since the Tor browser was released in 2002, the Dark Web constantly experienced a user growth all over the world. One of the reasons is its architecture that allows anonymity within the internet. Through the visualisation, Group 9 shows the usage of the Tor protocol by country within four years.