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 ;-) I was able to access the CAIN data­base which provides a superbly author­it­at­ive com­pen­dium of organ­iz­a­tions on on ‘the Troubles’ and polit­ics in North­ern Ire­land from 1968 to the present. 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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