I am a Digital Humanities Specialist at 
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.
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.
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.
As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, 
I was once again struck by the increasing number of familiar headlines. By this I don’t mean similar themes continue to be explored (although true - Hilary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kittens into wells), but rather that I had already read the articles that were popping as new posts. My immediate thought was that Reader wasn’t catching my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inadvertently created duplicate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with different authorship claimed. Note that I am not even getting into the automated blog post piracy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.
When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to strategically manage the multitude of feeds, the collapsing of feeds into headlines makes this phenomenon rather obvious. As I considered this, I realized that there is a certain tiering in the bloggosphere. Digg, Redit and other aggregators are at the lowest level and explicitly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that create absolutely original, thoughtful and unique posts. Between these there are all manners of variants. Review sites are somewhere in this milieu and they account for a substantial amount of this overlap. Some new gadget is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is interesting to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds coming in) post gravity and proliferation.
Yes, iSync has been with us for few years now. It should be rock solid. It’s not - yet. I recently wrote about my impressions of data detectors. Not rocket science, 
but a small and powerful addition to useful workflow on a Mac. That they also remind me of the promise that was the Newton makes them all the more welcome. But what can I say about iSync? One of the things that makes OSX such a compelling choice for day to day computing is the consistency of interface between applications and their ability to share information…not just data, but contexts and preferences and thus recognition and adaptability to user peculiarities that anthropomophise the laptop. The computer becomes somehow just something a little more. A trusted companion - not merely a clone of millions of other identical collections of aluminum, silicon and other substances.
Reuters released the API for their Calais web service last week. I dabbled with it quickly 
last week, and then was reminded about it earlier today. I took a closer look and come away very impressed and thoughtful about the application of this technology. Calais accepts text and quickly extracts a variety of meta data about your content or as they phrase it : “automatically annotates your content with rich semantic metadata.” Currently it attempts to determine references to:
- Entities: city, company, continent, country, industryTerm, MoneyAmount, Organization, Person, ProvinceOrState, Region and URL;
- Events/Facts: acquisition, alliance, bankruptcy, businessRelation, buybacks, companyEarningsAnnoucement, companyEarningsGuidance, companyInvestments, compantLegalIssues, jointVenture, ManagementChange, merger, personPolitical, personPoliticalPast, PersonProfession, PersonProfessionalPast, stockSplit
This is a rather rich collection of metadata - and they target expanding from here.
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Information Aesthetics, a consistently clickable and notable blog, has Fernanda Viégas reporting back from the
InfoVis Conference in Sacremento this week. She has posted a geat summary of the keynote address by Matthew Ericson. Brent Fitzgerald blogged yesterday about the panel that he, Fernanda, Martin Wattenberg and Hans Rosling are presenting as well. Taking a look at the conference programme, I could not but wish I was there. Thanks for Fernanda (and hopefully Brent) for giving us an experience as close to being there as possible.
By the way, today is the day of Fig, 7 Brumaire, An CCXVI.
Update: Something local and exciting: Social Networking Week at the University of Toronto. Fernanda is speaking on Friday.
Check out AideRSS - an exciting new tool to help manage information overload. It takes your existing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by perceived quality.
Wonderful paradigm shifting technologies are supposed to streamline our lives and allow us to rise to new creative heights. 
The promise of the paperless office was to provide electronic communications to free us from distractions and the minutiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile technologies were to unchain us from the physical offices to let us quickly complete necessary tasks while simultaneously participating in those pasttimes that we want to. You could ’seal the deal’ while watching your son’s soccer game for example. But, for all the promise, we now deal with more information and have to find ways to cope with greater engagement in more tasks than we have ever faced.
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Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at the Graphing Social Patterns conference seems to have readily accepted the term ‘Social Graph‘, recently applied by Mark Zuckerberg to his FaceBook service. 
Reading Sean Ammirati’s coverage of the talk reminded me of my own reservations about this term. When I first heard it I was a little confused. The immediate question was how is this different from a Social Network? - a term I thought I was familiar with. Realizing that this is tip to graph theory I wondered if referring to a rather abstract theoretical construct helps anyone to understand the Social Network phenomenon. Apparently I wasn’t the only one and Josh Catone raised very similar concerns when he asked, Is it Time to Retire the Social Graph?
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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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