randomosity

The Map Your Moves Chal­lenge fas­cin­ates me. New York’s Pub­lic Radio sta­tion WNYC has devised a data visu­al­isa­tion chal­lenge for their listen­ers. Curi­ous about what makes people move from and to their com­munity they polled stor­ies from their listen­ers and col­lec­ted them into a struc­tured data­set and have released it into the wild. Now this is very cool…they want to take real stor­ies and under­stand how these stor­ies inter­act and how they can learn about their own com­munity from them. Abso­lutely brilliant!

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Data visu­al­isa­tion has become very vogue in the digital human­it­ies com­munity. Although there have been a scat­ter­ing of brave prac­ti­tion­ers over the past few years, only very recently has this inter­dis­cip­lin­ary area star­ted to fea­ture prom­in­ently at DH con­fer­ences as a main­stream prac­tise worthy of consideration.

For the last few months I have been look­ing for an oppor­tun­ity (i.e. a bit of time) to delve into R and Pro­cessing, spe­cific­ally with an eye towards tak­ing some exist­ing visu­al­isa­tions I am work­ing on to a new level.

The first book of interest is R in a Nut­shell by James Adler recently pub­lished by O’Reilly.

R is a lan­guage and an envir­on­ment to sup­port data ana­lyt­ics and visu­al­isa­tion. Its approach­able, extens­ible and open source. One of the advant­ages of R over other comers is the num­ber of rather pol­ished inter­pret­ers avail­able for it and some of the great examples float­ing about that have been con­struc­ted in R. Hence my interest. I come to this interest from a digital human­it­ies back­ground and wondered whether the lan­guage could be of use for work­ing with my own data com­ing from farm diar­ies explor­ing the cycle of sea­sonal farm activities.

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Eric Fisc­her has pos­ted a new series of visu­al­isa­tions ‘Loc­als and Tour­ists’ depict­ing the loc­a­tion of pho­tos taken in urban areas around the world. In this series he attempts to dis­tin­guish between those taken by tour­ists (people who seem to be a local of a dif­fer­ent city and who took pic­tures in this city for less than a month) and those by loc­als (people who have taken pic­tures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.

What imme­di­ately struck me was his ingeni­ous re-use of the exist­ing data to cre­ate new inform­a­tion. By explor­ing indi­vidu­als pos­ted pic­tures over time he was able to hypo­thes­ise as to whether they were vis­it­ing or resid­ing in a par­tic­u­lar area. This allowed for a means to com­pare the gaze of the two groups.

I imme­di­ately star­ted to explore his map of Dub­lin to see if any pat­terns emerged and then to try and sug­gest explan­a­tions for them. There is a healthy and reg­u­lar mix of pho­tos by both groups in the cent­ral core, but imme­di­ately to the east is a large blue box of pho­tos taken by loc­als. It appears to sur­round the new Aviva Lans­downe Sta­dium in Balls­bridge. Addi­tion­ally on the north­side the National Botan­ical Gar­dens have a heavy con­cen­tra­tion of pho­to­graphs by locals.

The most prac­tical applic­a­tion of Loc­als versus tour­ists is to con­sider how a vis­itor might use these visu­al­isa­tions to find the hid­den city known only to its inhab­it­ants — to find those secret spots worthy of cap­ture by loc­als, but seem­ingly missed in the tour­ist guides.

This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geot­ag­gers’ World Atlas’ look­ing at from where the pic­tures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.

I came across this one in a book on the Rush Lib­rary. Not that earth shat­ter­ing, but some­thing about the tex­tual over­lay caught my eye. Could be the use of text rather than col­our and legend, or rather than icons to rep­res­ent the use of the space. Well done.

Am par­ti­cip­at­ing in the Day of Digital Human­it­ies organ­ised by Peter Organ­is­ciak, Geof­frey Rock­well, and Stan Rueker. Check it out.

I made a few quick ref­er­ences to the mode by which I trans­fer my long and lat data to Google Earth for route dis­play. I was asked whether I was cap­tur­ing alti­tude inform­a­tion along with 2D pos­i­tion and the answer to this is yes. In fact, there are a vari­ety of inter­est­ing ways of visu­al­ising this data. Although Google Earth does allow for some manip­u­la­tion of this, I recently star­ted using GPS Visu­al­izer to play with this dimen­sion. If you point it at your data file it can provide you with some inter­est­ing per­spect­ives on your trips.

The week­end jaunt down coun­try looks like this:

A second cool way of show­ing this same alti­tude map­ping is to simply col­our code the 2D route for alti­tude. This map was also gen­er­ated at GPS Visu­al­izer using the same dataset:

Hav­ing used the Roy­al­Tek RGM-3800 for a week now I am very pleased with it. The biggest test to date came yes­ter­day when I grabbed a couple new AAA bat­ter­ies for it and made the fix at the apart­ment. I popped it in my suit jacket and headed off on a road trip down coun­try with my friend Mary. The little unit kept a fix all the way south, whether in the car, inside build­ings, in the train and the bat­ter­ies las­ted an even 10 hours (per­fectly timed for me re-entering the apartment.

I wish the unit could sync with OSX rather than hav­ing to use Par­al­lels to use the sup­plied data sync software.

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Today’s gad­get du jour is the Roy­al­tek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and Data­log­ger. I have long wanted to exper­i­ment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS data­log­ger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that pro­jects your track on an LCD screen with the dif­fer­ence being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your pos­i­tion to flash memory at reg­u­lar inter­vals. You can then down­load the data­file to your com­puter and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.

It arrived this morn­ing and I popped the bat­ter­ies into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the soft­ware (Win­dows only unfor­tu­nately — Par­al­lels to the res­cue). The install was smooth and the device was recog­nized imme­di­ately. I access it and changed to log­ging inter­val to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a cur­rent mobile phone. It is powered by two AA bat­ter­ies which sup­posed allow it to fill the memory a few times.

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Last night marked a first visit to the IFI (Irish Film Insti­tute). The IFI, I have gathered and can now con­firm is a won­der­ful

venue for those in the know. They fea­ture a full slate of movies, largely European indie flicks, def­in­itely of eclectic rather than pop­u­lar taste. Last night for example fea­tured: Paris, City of Men, L’Heure d’été and Led­jis.
Last night’s object­ive was to see the rather innoc­u­ously named Paris. Read the movie sum­mary, but went in with little idea about what we were going to see. This 2008 film from Cédric Klapisch earns a very strong must see recom­mend­a­tion! It centres on the flam­boy­ant pro­fes­sional dan­cer Pierre (Romain Duris), who has been dia­gnosed with a ter­minal heart con­di­tion and his sis­ter (Juli­ette Binoche) who sheds work respons­ib­il­it­ies to move in and care for him. Much in the style of his earlier, and superb L’Auberge Espangnole, Klapisch ingeni­ously webs a series of tan­gen­tially inter­lock­ing story lines. He keeps you guess­ing at to when and where the stor­ies will inter­sect, and aside from some rather clumsy fore­shad­ow­ing in one of the tra­gic sequences, he plays his hand well.

Cross-posted to Dub­lin­ica.

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Video on the other blog