- Go By Example — a chance to replicate the experience of learning Perl or PHP, whereby you know nothing but copy and adapt other people’s code until it works and you’ve empirically acquired an intuition for what will trigger the compiler’s deathray and eventually someone points you to the docs that were opaque and suddenly a lightbulb goes off in your head and you shout “omigod I finally get it!” and the Real Engineer beside you rolls their eyes and gets back to genericising their containers for consensus or whatever it is that Real Engineers do now.
- Penrose Binning — entrancing visual hack for maps.
- Chinese Shopping for Robotic Ventures — Amazon has drones, Facebook has VR, Google and China are fighting it out for Robots. Meanwhile, Apple is curled up in a mountain filled with gold, their paws twitching and stroking their watches as they dream of battles to come.
- Robot Arm Brings Humanity Back to the Stone Age (IEEE) — Using robots to build a massive database of scrape/wear patterns for different stone-age tools. Currently, Iovita is experiencing some opposition from within his own profession. Some believe that manual experiments are closer to the past reality; others find that use-wear analysis in general does not advance archaeological theory. Iovita thinks this is mainly due to the fact that most archaeologists have a humanities background and are not familiar with the world of engineers. OH SNAP.
"humanities" entries
Four short links: 1 May 2015
Go Examples, Penrose Map Hacks, Robotics Industry, and Archaeological Robotics
Four short links: 18 March 2013
Big Lit Data, 6502 Assembly, Small Startup Analytics, and Javascript Heatmaps
- A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (PDF) — This project was simultaneously an experiment in developing quantitative and computational methods for tracing changes in literary language. We wanted to see how far quantifiable features such as word usage could be pushed toward the investigation of literary history. Could we leverage quantitative methods in ways that respect the nuance and complexity we value in the humanities? To this end, we present a second set of results, the techniques and methodological lessons gained in the course of designing and running this project. Even litcrit becoming a data game.
- Easy6502 — get started writing 6502 assembly language. Fun way to get started with low-level coding.
- How Analytics Really Work at a Small Startup (Pete Warden) — The key for us is that we’re using the information we get primarily for decision-making (should we build out feature X?) rather than optimization (how can we improve feature X?). Nice rundown of tools and systems he uses, with plug for KissMetrics.
- webgl-heatmap (GitHub) — a JavaScript library for high performance heatmap display.
Four short links: 16 December 2011
Underground Map Viz, Teaching Programming, Humanities Visualization, Mobile Browser Test
- Subway Map jQuery Plugin — create your own London Underground-style maps. (via Chris Spurgeon)
- Webcraft and Programming for Free Range Students — a p2pu class for teachers of web stuff and programming.
- Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks 2012 — CFP for a conference in Chicago, looking for visualization and data-analysis papers with a background in the humanities.
- How to Go Mo — clever idea. Everyone at a company should be able to say “hey, our site looks like crap on mobile browsers!”, bringing pressure to fix it. 1/3 of people browse the web on their phone.
The boffins and the luvvies
The names may change, but the friction between science and art goes back centuries.
Whether we're discussing ancients vs. moderns, scientists vs. poets, or the latest variant, computer science vs. humanities, the debate between science and art is persistent and quite old.
Four short links: 19 August 2011
Javascript Scraping, Molecular Visualization, Document Conversion, and Humanities Digitization
- pjscrape — Javascript scraping framework. (via Joshua Schachter)
- CanvasMol — molecular visualization in HTML5. (via Aimee Whitcroft)
- Docvert 1.5 — new version of the code to convert Office files to DocBook and HTML.
- Seven Important Digitization Projects in the Humanities (BrainPickings) — check out The Republic of Letters from Stanford, a very nifty visualization of relationships between Enlightenment thinkers. It has a pretty demo.