- Reality Bytes — We make things because that’s how we understand. We make things because that’s how we pass them on, and because everything we have was passed on to us as a made object. We make things in digital humanities because that’s how we interpret and conserve our inheritance. Because that’s how we can make it all anew. Librarians, preservation, digital humanities, and the relationship between digital and physical. Existential threats don’t scare us. We’re librarians.
- Kickstarter Stats — as Andy Baio said, it’s the one Kickstarter feature that competitors won’t be rushing to emulate. Clever way to emphasize their early lead.
- ICANN is Wrong (Dave Winer) — Dave is right to ask why nobody’s questioning the lack of public registration in the new domains. You can understand why, say, the Australia-New Zealand bank wouldn’t let Joe Random register in .anz, but Amazon are proposing to keep domains like .shop, .music, .app for their own products. See all the bidders for the new gTLDs on the ICANN web site.
- The Art of GPS (Daily Mail) — beautiful visualizations of uncommon things, such as the flights that dead bodies make when they’re being repatriated to their home states. Personally, I think they tend too much to the “pretty” and insufficient to the “informative” or “revealing”, but then I’m notorious for being too revealing and insufficiently informative.
"visualisation" entries
Four short links: 22 June 2012
Why We Make, Kickstarter Stats, Dodgy Domains, and Pretty Pretty Pictures
Four short links: 9 February 2012
Web-based Visualization, Javascript Charting, Automating Education, Sniffing HTTP(S)
- Weave — web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. GPL and MPL-licensed. (via Flowing Data)
- Flotr2 — MIT-licensed Javascript library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs. It is a branch of flotr which removes the Prototype dependency and includes many improvements. (via Javascript Weekly)
- What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Math Education Again And Again (Dan Meyer) — nicely said: it’s hard to test true understanding, easy to automate only part of the testing and assessment support for learners.
- mitmproxy — GPLv3-licensed SSL-aware HTTP proxy which lets you snoop on the traffic being sent back to the mothership from apps.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping Mexico's drug war
Diego Valle-Jones' interactive map illustrates the toll of Mexico's drug war.
This week's visualization comes from Diego Valle-Jones, who has created a powerful interactive map of the drug-related homicides in Mexico since 2004.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping Mexico’s drug war
Diego Valle-Jones' interactive map illustrates the toll of Mexico's drug war.
This week's visualization comes from Diego Valle-Jones, who has created a powerful interactive map of the drug-related homicides in Mexico since 2004.
Visualization of the Week: Politicians' word counts
The New York Times looks at the word counts of presidential candidates.
This week's visualization comes from The New York Times and is an example of the increasing usage of visualizations to make political arguments.
Visualization of the Week: Politicians’ word counts
The New York Times looks at the word counts of presidential candidates.
This week's visualization comes from The New York Times and is an example of the increasing usage of visualizations to make political arguments.
Four short links: 19 January 2012
Android Fragmentation, Hosting Technologies, Face Recognition, and Data Design
- Fragmentation is Not The End of Android — full of trenchant insights, this post considers the many implications of the Android value chain. Only Apple directly profits from being an OS provider in the mobile ecosystem. For Google it is a cost center particularly struck me. Anyone know whether Google offers to (for money) maintain branded carrier- and/or device-specific versions of Android? Seems like a natural business model given their development pipeline and desire to ensure availability of updates. (via John Gruber)
- Chart of Y Combinator Companies’ Hosting Decisions — just what it says.
- Muststache — fun Chrome extension using face recognition to add mustaches to faces in pictures. Ten years ago, almost every kind of face recognition was a dark art requiring many computrons. Today it’s a toy.
- Stamen’s 2011 — frankly astonishing year of beautiful and meaningful visualizations and design. They continue to provide the benchmarks for designing with data.
Visualization of the Week: AntiMap
A mobile mapping app lets users capture and visualize their movements.
The DIY mapping tool AntiMap lets users capture their movements via their mobile devices, then visualize and analyze their movements.
Four short links: 23 December 2011
Preview Colourblindness, Commandline Datamining, Open Source Indexing, and Javascript Time Series
- See the World as a Colour-Blind Person Would — filters that let you see images as protanopes, deuteranopes, and even tritanopes would see them. I am protanoptic (if that’s a word) and I can vouch that the “after” pix look the same as “before” to me. Care, because about 8% of men have some form of colourblindness and hate you and your “red is bad, green is good” visual cues. (via Flowing Data)
- Waffles — seeks to be the world’s most comprehensive collection of command-line tools for machine learning and data mining.
- LinkedIn Open Sources Index and Query Services — full-text index and retrieval engine, APIs, and a framework to manage indexes on infrastructure-as-a-service.
- Rickshaw — a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping traffic casualties
A BBC visualization maps every traffic casualty in the UK between 1999-2010.
More than a decade's worth of traffic accident data is plotted out in a BBC visualization. Locations with a history of accidents are hard to miss.