randomosity

Faced with finding a place to live in Dublin, I decided to quickly attempt to create a mashup of potential properties mapped throughout the city. This is, I sense, an increasingly common sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find anything that accomplished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manually in either the My Maps section of Google Maps or create a KML overlay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynamically generated and capture the list current to when I was looking at it. I would note that many sites have their own spatial displays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dublin scene. The site I was using to look for rental opportunities is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selections on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) listings in the area of the listing you have chosen. You can additionally select a particular agency and have their listings plotted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My objective was to create a custom search, take the detailed results, identify the location, geocode it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple - in practise subject to the vagaries of daft and the tools used.

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The folks at Many Eyes recently introduced their new comparison cloud tool. Basically, it lets you visualise two fragments of text displaying word frequency for each in the same cloud. It’s an interesting addition to the more familiar word cloud. Using a standard word cloud you get a matrix of words with relative size, weight or colour highlighting frequency in a selected text. This quickly allows you to visually perceive an author or speaker’s emphasis on a particular theme or style of writing or speaking. With Many Eyes hybrid tool, words which occur in both text are abutted. You can now visually compare two texts from the same author for similar empahsis or quickly determine a difference between texts. In the example presented at Many Eyes, they compare the US presidential State of the Union addresses from 2002 and 2003. In this example they note the less frequent mention of Afghanistan and the increase in mention of Saddam. Whether this allows one to conclude a change in policy or not, it does demonstrate the use of the tool for provoking questions for further exploration.

On Saturday, the Ontario government officially announced how much funding each university in Ontario is to receive for maintenance and renewal of facilities. I just happened to see announcements from a few institutions appear simultaneously in my RSS reader and was struck by the rather different ways in which they presented this news.

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I use both GraphViz and OmniGraffle to construct charts involving relationships and processes. Over the last few days I was noodling my way through a schematic of sectarian associations in Northern Ireland. Trying to get the players and organizations straight was simply impossible for me without some sort of visual aid. I did a quick scan of the usual suspects to determine whether anyone already had something that would suit my needs, but only found textual compilations. Although comprehensive, these required more than casual scans to get an immediate sense of who fits where. I put the chart before the horse this time and started drawing on a napkin. I presupposed that I would need to visually distinguish between political organizations and paramilitary ones, and also between religio/political affiliations. The colours green and orange sprang to mind as good visual cues ;-) Chronology was also a factor and I had an additional temporal dimension to consider. The napkin was overwhelmed.

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Bill Turkel has written a thought provoking post at Digital History Hacks calling for a re-conception of how we ‘do’ history. He summarizes his understanding of the conventional process involving measured, concrete steps, that unfortunately presuppose that time essentially stands still as we practise our craft. Here I learn about Parmenides. Turkel proposes a radical new model that accounts, not only for the aspect of continual change, but to my mind also suggests that the future of our practise is in greater real-time collective research products. I would normally point directly at a notable post, but this one warranted particular acknowledgement in hope that you will check it out. Great points to ponder.

I seem to have been posting much on the subject of note-taking as of late. It’s the seasonal thing.
What I suddenly realized amongst my plaudits for techniques and for tools was a gem of a concept that Geoffrey and I have been ruminating over for the past year or so: TiddlyWiki. In case you have missed the Tiddly thing, it is a tiny, entirely self-contained information storage mechanism that uses a wiki-style of interlinked and tagged entries. Unlike the more traditional wiki’s, it is entirely local. While this poses some backup and access issues, it also means that you don’t need an internet connection to edit data, it is blazing fast and very secure. Its extremely easy to use and if you think about what is going on, its an amazing concept.
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Last week I pointed readers to the excellent article by Dustin Wax comparing note-taking methodologies and weighing the pros and cons of a couple techniques. I was not personally aware of the Cornell method. I am however a big fan of Microsoft OneNote for organization not just of notes, but of research materials of all kinds. I use blogs, wikis and OneNote together to manage my data and happened upon a Cornell template for One Note users this morning.
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I threw this link into an aside, and then thought better of it. It might get lost there, and this latest post from the consistently pragmatic Dustin Wax on Taking Better Notes has a plethora of great tips. He also introduces the Cornell System for notetaking which I find quite intriguing and well worth a look.
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The tentative title for post this was how to get ahead by really trying, but I thought this might actually sounds a little too preachy. Without making this too much of a habit (stealing from another’s hard work), Dustin Wax has compiled a great set of suggestions on how to ‘Make this your best Semester Yet‘. I previously noted his excellent article on how to put a wiki to personal use and he has taken some time to assemble a set of thoughtful and powerful reminders on how to tackle the semester.
I draw particular attention to his suggestions to ‘know your professor’ and ’speak up’. These are oft overlooked aspects of the learning environment, but crucial ones. This list reminds us all (I have a student hat on myself as well as TA) that your education calls for strategy and operates at a variety of levels. Ones that I sure which someone highlighted for me at the outset, as opposed to having discover on my own. Even if only a couple of these remind or instruct, they can make a huge difference on your effectiveness this semester.

Today I had a wonderful discussion with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes website that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launching their site, they have been hard at work bringing us new means of visualizing datasets and providing a social network for dataheads. My earlier article I spoke glowingly of the attention to detail that the site exhibited and wealth of charting opportunities offered. I also promised I would play more with the site.
In the last few months I have had an opportunity to just that.
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I am a big fan of wikis for note-taking, research material collation and organization. There are a wide variety of easy to use, free wiki services online and an increasing number of small footprint, simple standalone wikis. I probably should have blogged about this earlier and shared some of my experiences, but an excellent article by Dustin Wax at lifehack.org does a superb job of explaining the rationale and gives some great how to tips.
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