Stephan Thiel
Geb. 1983 in Jena
Schwerpunkte
Interaction- & Informationdesign
Kurzvita
Stephan is a freelance interaction and information designer based in Berlin, Germany. He originated in Gera, Thuringia, where his professional work experience included acting, dramaturgy, video, stage and sound design at the TheaterFABRIK Gera.
Stephan holds a B.A. in Interfacedesign from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and will be doing his MFA in Media Art and Design at the Bauhaus University Weimar beginning October 2010. He has worked as a freelance designer for the Interaction Design Lab Potsdam, the Hans Otto Theatre and companies like Samsung Europe, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the Mace EU-Project and Local Projects in New York. Since March 2008 he is a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, e.V., Germanys largest academic foundation.
Additionally Stephan is lecturing at various universities and organizations and has initiated creativecoding.org together with Steffen Fiedler and Jonas Loh — a teaching platform for computational design.
Understanding Shakespeare
Towards a Visual Form for Dramatic Language and Texts
Studiengang Interfacedesign
Betreuung Prof. Boris Müller, Prof. Matthias Krohn
Abschluss 2010
Beschreibung deutsch
Understanding Shakespeare beschäftigt sich mit der Visualisierung von Shakespeares Dramen als eine neue Form des Lesens die sich den heutigen Gewohnheiten für die Beschäftigung mit Literatur und Wissen anpasst. Basierend auf den Daten des WordHoard Projektes »einer umfassenden, linguistischen Datenbank über Shakespeares Werke« wurden fünf Ansätze entwickelt, die Möglichkeiten aufzeigen, wie dramatische Texte analysiert und visualisiert werden können, um die in ihnen enthaltene Geschichte zum Vorschein zu bringen und neue Einblicke in die Werke Shakespeares zu ermöglichen.
Description english
Understanding Shakespeare is the B.A. thesis project of Stephan Thiel at the Interfacedesign program of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Its goal is to introduce a new form of reading drama to help understand Shakespeares works in new and insightful ways and to address our changed habits of consuming narrative works and knowledge through the capabilities of information visualization.
As a result, and based on data from the WordHoard project of the Northwestern University, an application of computational tools was explored in order to extract and visualize the information found within the text and to reveal its underlying narrative algorithm. The five approaches presented here are the first step towards a dicussion of this potentionally new form of reading in an attempt to regain interest in the literary and cultural heritage of Shakespeare’s works among a general audience.
The visualizations were designed as large scale prints (90cm x ~220cm) for an exhibition scenario that would enable a broad audience to re-understand Shakespeare. They were created using mainly Processing and toxiclibs (for geometry and color calculations) as well as several other Natural Language Processing libraries (i.e. Classifier4J). Please be aware that the experience of these works might differ substantially between the web and the original printed version.
