Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

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Processing implemented in Javascript

In Processing, Weblog on 8 May 2008 tagged javascript, Processing.org with 3 comments

John Resig, of JQuery fame, has ported the Processing language and API to javascript. Not just the API, the language too!

Visualizing Urban Data: A Journey Through Oakland Crimespotting

In Weblog on 7 May 2008 tagged crime, Maps, oakland, Slides, stamen, Talks, Work with no comments

Liz Goodman recently invited Mike and I to speak at the UC Berkeley School of Information. We took the opportunity to give a full length talk about a single project, Oakland Crimespotting, which is something of a rarity since we normally try talk about lots of things a little bit, rather than one thing in depth.

Mike started and finished the talk with an in-depth look at the motivations, technical details and social issues surrounding the site, which you can read about on his blog. In the middle I gave a brief overview of related projects and talked about the how the site sits alongside our other mapping work at Stamen. Mike suggested I use a reverse-chronological narrative structure that he liked from a book about Polish history, so I started with the stuff we've finished recently and working back to Stamen's early work with MoveOn and Mappr.

Mike has since reprised the talk for the journalism school, and the whole hour is up on Youtube (part 2 here) if you have time to watch it. Alternatively, you can attempt to simultaneously read the full version of this post and Mike's post together to get a wordier overview of what we talked about.

[At this point Mike has briefly introduced the Oakland Crime site and flash map, and hands over to me for related projects and studio context]

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Oops

In Weblog on 3 May 2008 tagged cliff, Flickr, ocean, oops, timelapse, Video with 1 comment

Data Visualisation Blogs You Might Not Know About

In Weblog on 16 April 2008 tagged Blogs, information-visualisation with 37 comments

A quick thanks to Nathan Yau for the plug over at Flowing Data...

I tried to add a comment there with some blogs I subscribe to (some already mentioned, some not) but I suspect the spam filter thought I was nuts to try posting 20 links. So here are a few other blogs/feeds you might like, if you like Flowing Data and came here from there:

• http://infosthetics.com/
• http://flowingdata.com/
• http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
• http://benfry.com/writing/
• http://www.formfollowsbehavior.com/
• http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/
• http://blog.many-eyes.com/
• http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/
• http://simplecomplexity.net/
• http://leebyron.com/how/
• http://eagereyes.org/
• http://accuracyandaesthetics.com/
• http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/
• http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/bertinie/visuale/
• http://well-formed-data.net/
• http://www.numberpix.com/
• http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/
• http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/
• http://informationandvisualization.de/
• http://designnotes.info/
• http://perceptualedge.com/blog/
• http://shiffman.net/
• http://abeautifulwww.com/
• http://makingmaps.wordpress.com/
• http://www.bestiario.org/blog/

My colleagues Mike, Eric and Shawn might also blog about info-viz from time to time, at least as relevantly as I do.

And del.icio.us, as ever, is indispensable for finding infoviz blogs.

Who have I missed? Let me know in the comments!

W(e are )here: Mapping The Human Experience

In Processing, Weblog on 14 April 2008 tagged exhibitions, opengl, Processing.org, stamen, trulia hindsight, Videos, Work with no comments

Eric is in Minneapolis at the moment talking about our work at the University of Minnesota. The talk has been in the works for a while but nicely coincides with W(e are )here, and exhibition we're participating in organised by Solutions Twin Cities.

We've prepared a special version of Trulia Hindsight for the show, using the experimental version of Modest Maps I made for Processing in February and animating data for around 1 million homes using OpenGL. We're not ready to distribute the data to a wider audience yet, but here's an example animation from the application:

Trulia Hindsight - Twin Cities Edition from Stamen on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jamie from Trulia for getting us the data we needed to present Trulia Hindsight in this way.

Google’s App Engine

In Weblog on 7 April 2008 tagged app engine, Business, Development, google, Web with no comments

Some unstructured thoughts on Google exposing some big web-app hosting infrastructure:

• Obviously using this probably makes you acquisition-friendly and/or more hire-able to Google?
• But does the appearance of a service like this make it more attractive to leave Google? When do those FYIFV T-Shirts come out anyway?
• And if you used to work at Google, and you left, would this style of development be something you'd miss? Would you use a former employer's service as a leg-up in your new gig?
• Have enough people left Google trained in this style of web development to constitute a market segment in their own right?
• Is this a case of programmers commoditising their complements?
• It's probably a good thing that Techcrunch currently has the number 1 match for "google app engine" on Google, right?

OpenStreetMap GPS Visualisation

In Weblog on 26 March 2008 tagged Animations, GPS, gpx, Maps, movies, OpenStreetMap, Youtube with no comments

I frequently get emails asking me about visualising collections of GPS traces as an animation. The OpenStreetMap community is way ahead of me on this one, and has a tool called Party Render to create animations of mapping activity.

Here's one that Mikel just pointed out from a recent mapping party in Mumbai:

InFFFFringement!?

In Weblog on 11 March 2008 tagged copyright, ffffound with 5 comments

Does anyone know what image was here before it was removed? I wish the attribution link was working!

Update: thanks to the unique filename and unusual size, Mike and I are pretty sure it's this image he found here (and they found here).

Update II: Karen Kurycki clarifies in the comments. Thanks Karen!

Modest Maps vs Processing

In Processing, Weblog on 18 February 2008 tagged Code, Maps, modest-maps, Processing.org with 6 comments

Since Mike simultaneously outed me and out-did me and linked to the Processing folder of the Modest Maps source at the same time, I thought I'd better post a version of the library I've been working on so that I can stop thinking about it for a while.

So:

Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python...

...And Processing

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Correlation = Causation

In Weblog on 13 February 2008 tagged causation, correlation, history, statistics with no comments

Ben Tesch overlays the timeline of technology adoption and the timeline of cool and concludes that the clothes dryer was responsible for the rise of soul music. I like it.

I'm reminded of my reaction to the wall of statistics about the world before and after Bill Clinton's presidency, at his library in Little Rock, Arkansas. We're told that among other things the national debt, the number nuclear warheads and world poverty all went down, but that AIDS increased. I'm led to believe that nuclear warheads prevent AIDS, or possibly that AIDS prevents nuclear warheads. Clearly.