Instructions for today - follow the link above and type ‘Mental Health’ into the search box.  Pick any number of stories from the Mental Health Universe (that will after some patience, load)

I discovered Johnathan Harris a while ago through one of his sites done in collaboration with Sep Kamvar who interestingly is working on how to measure fiscally the impact of social capital.  If there was something I would like to do it would be to provide a platform to experiment with this concept in terms of the voluntary sector in mental health in Leeds - imagine having a way to actually financially measure throughout the full community how support works for people.    But I digress.

What interests me is the way in which they present information. 

They work on the basis of connecting science and art.  And they also seem to base alot of what they do on the Stotchastic process which strikes me as a mathematical and scientific approach to the measuring of the irrationality of human beings.  Something that if you are now involved in creating measuring outcomes and outputs for mental health services may be of interest. 

They connect to human conversation on the web through a variety of bot mechanisms that crawl through blogs or news items.

With the human society generated data they then present this in a way that is both visual and dimensionally different to how information services on the web have traditionally been.  I’m seeing more and more everyday how their work is influencing the thinking and development of the web and how we connect to what we want to know.

For more info on their work try;

http://www.number27.org/

and

http://www.kamvar.org/