SHANTI Interactive Visualizations Application (SHIVA) is an online application that makes it easy to produce interactive visualizations from various media - photographs, videos, texts - or easy to create structured data in the form of rows and columns within Google spreadsheets. Visualizations include charts, maps, images, timelines, video, and networks.
Instead of building new tools in-house, we drew inspiration from David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A unified theory of the Web, and have fashioned a simple and consistent interface allowing easy and integrated access to open source and open access tools on the web, such as Google's Visualization Toolkit and Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, and Kaltura videos, and the SIMILE timeline from MIT, images from ARTstor, Flickr, and Picasa.
The data that drives the charts and timelines can come directly from Google Doc's online spreadsheets, facilitating collaboration between multiple contributors. The maps can have any number of overlays, including markers, images, such as historical photos, and online layers of specific types of features (called "KML" layers) for more involved geographic information.
The resulting visualizations can be used as stand-alone webpages without requiring a website to store them, embedded into existing WordPress and Drupal sites, or combined into fully interactive visualizations, where sophisticated interactions between them can be easily made.
The annotation layer - "drawing" - allows you to create and share hand-drawn and graphical annotations which you can overlay on any of the visualizations. Thus you can support inquiry through these new narrative and communication opportunities.
SHIVA was developed at the University of Virginia's Science, Humanities and Arts Network of Technological Initiatives (SHANTI). SHANTI promotes innovation at the University of Virginia through the use of advanced digital technologies in research, teaching, publishing, and collaborative engagement.