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.

There was a time when the the bril­liant illu­min­ated manu­scripts of Irish Mon­as­ter­ies rep­res­en­ted the pas­sion­ate col­lec­tion of the works of the sol­it­ary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intric­ate knot pat­terns are a study in a real pat­tern lan­guage. Years ago, when my cre­at­ive juices were sought a middle ground between a clear sys­tem­atic approach and yearn­ing to find break out of these same sys­tems, I dis­covered the work of George and Iain Bain. — father and son. The elder Bain made a life­time study of find­ing the pat­terns in the knot­work and devis­ing tech­niques to allow oth­ers to appre­ci­ate these and to rep­lic­ate these celtic mas­ter­works for them­selves. His son built on these tech­niques to devise a an even sim­pler way of cre­at­ing the ela­bour­ate designs. I was hooked and pro­duced some large scale knot pat­terns. I also dis­covered the won­der of dood­ling in square and tri­an­gu­lar knot pat­terns. At one point I even delved into zoomorph­ical celtic art­work and dic­sov­ered and even lar­ger challenge.

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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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I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a won­der­ful assort­ment of story and author visu­al­iz­a­tion tools avail­able there that are both mes­mer­iz­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. Navel gaz­ing is a won­der­ful past-time and methinks that Digg is mak­ing a con­cer­ted effort at per­fect­ing the art. I am par­tic­u­larly attrac­ted to the new Arc tool. Its shows story pop­ular­ity in real­time and also makes a link between stor­ies dugg by the same users. Thicker vec­tors indic­ate story pop­ular­ity. Inter­est­ing.
The Stac visu­al­iz­a­tion is also extremely cool. A col­lec­tion of stor­ies rep­res­en­ted by bars of varyiong shades based on pop­ular­ity spread across the bot­tom of the screen and then as they are dugg, weight blocks fall from above rein­for­cing the story title. Just neat. And as before far to mes­mer­iz­ing.
Its a quick way to gauge pop­ular­ity and user activ­ity. The anim­a­tion is smooth and enter­tain­ing. Pop­u­lar of course has noth­ing to do with my interest or rel­ev­ance, but the visu­al­iz­a­tion is effect­ive in con­vey­ing the info and it does make a fine screensaver. Apple’s new RSS visu­al­izer in Leo­pard is another cool infofeed screensaver. Visu­ally stunning.

I have a few friends on Face­book. Last week at the Social Network/ing Con­fer­ence, I was reminded that the Many Eyes applic­a­tion has a Face­book applic­a­tion that quickly grabs your social net­work and allows you to paste it into Many Eyes to get a quick visu­al­iz­a­tion of your social net­work. I finally got around to try­ing mine.

I just happened to take a quick peek at the cam­era stats at Flickr today. I had uploaded and explored this data on ManyEyes a years or so ago and per­haps not sur­pris­ingly noted that Canon dom­in­ated the point-and-shoot mar­ket and that Nikon and Canon were bat­tling for dom­in­ance in the DSLR market…all accord­ing to Flickr post­ings which may cre­ate some skew. Intriguingly when I took a quick look at the post­ing num­bers by cam­era today, there’s some­thing else very inter­est­ing hap­pen­ing: fewer people seem to be using the most pop­u­lar cam­era mod­els. Is the mar­ket diver­si­fy­ing on a model or man­u­fac­turer basis?
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What a treat! I had had the hon­our of meet­ing and spend­ing the last two days chat­ting with Fernanda Vié­gas from the Visual Com­mu­nic­a­tions Lab. Her work has been and con­tin­ues to be inspir­a­tional for me per­son­ally and to the inform­a­tion visu­al­isa­tion com­munity more sub­stan­tially. She presen­ted a tan­tal­iz­ing talk at the Social Network/ing con­fer­ence at OISE/UofT. ‘Visu­al­iz­ing and Ana­lyz­ing Social Net­works’ quickly demon­strated a small facet of Many Eyes to a new audi­ence and gave us a sneak pre­view of a new tool soon to be avail­able through ManyEyes called Pivot­Graph. The logic of the Pivot­Graph is one of those ah-ha moments — it makes all the sense in the world, but leave it to Fernanda and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg to visu­al­ize the prob­lem, and come up with a bril­liant way to solve it. Con­sider that social net­works have tra­di­tion­ally been visu­al­ized in two ways: the node-link map and the mat­rix. The com­mon to node-link method is very intu­it­ive, but also becomes quickly cluttered and loses visu­al­iz­a­tion value as the scale of the net­work being mapped grows. The second is the rep­res­ent­at­ive mat­rix, which scales very well, but sac­ri­fices intu­ition for clar­ity. Real­iz­ing that there had to be a way of com­bin­ing the strengths and min­im­iz­ing the weak­nesses, the Pivot­Graph hybrid­ize these two forms using a col­lapsible node-link meta­phor that, inter­act­ively aggreg­ates like nodes and allows for focus on indi­vidual vec­tors. It’s noth­ing short of amaz­ing to see in action!
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