Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Visualizing Urban Data: A Journey Through Oakland Crimespotting
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]
XTech 2007, and visiting London
I'll be back in London in a couple of weeks, on May 18th right after XTech 2007 in Paris where Mike and I will be speaking about visualisations of time.
Some themes/highlights I'm looking forward to from the schedule:
- Aaron Straup Cope (Yahoo/Flickr) and Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) are both talking about paper and printing and the web.
- Blaine Cook (Obvious/Twitter) and Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Yahoo/Flickr) are talking about Jabber (IM) and social software for robots.
- I'm interested to see if Simon Willison can keep up his momentum on OpenID (I'm a skeptic).
- It will be good to catch up with Steve Coast and talk about OpenStreetMap
- Matt Biddulph is (sadly) talking about his work in Second Life but hopefully also about his recent shift to working full-time on Dopplr too.
Registration closes on Tuesday, so if you want to hang out with us, see all that, and hear keynotes from Adam Greenfield, Gavin Starks and Schulze & Webb, you should jump to it and register!
At some point I'm going to stop pretending that I'll write this blog with any regularity. In the meantime, if you're wondering what I'm up to you should know that life in San Francisco is great and that Stamen are treating me very well... If you want to know more you'll just have to grab me face to face, or at least wait for my current project to launch by which point I might find time to breathe. We'll see!
SxSW Interactive, Saturday March 10th
Just a quick note to say that on Saturday March 10th I'll be appearing at SxSWi in Austin, Texas as part of a panel convened by Flickr/geoblogger's Rev Dan Catt entitled "Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?". In the fancy SxSW panel picker, Dan's proposal read:
"Last year online mapping was emerging, now it's everywhere; on your mobile, in your camera, on your wearable head-up display, in your location aware clothing, even on paper and in your kids. Which of those did I totally make up? Guess it's time to check in with those people who actually make maps, merge virtual and real worlds at location flux points, and, you know, put maps online."
It sounds great! I'll be wearing both my old, trusty OpenStreetMap hat and my new, fancy Stamen hat, which should make for an interesting balancing act.
Ask Later #2
Steve is organising another Ask Later talk session for Tuesday December 12th. Obviously, since I'll be in San Francisco I won't be there, but if you're in London you should definitely take a look, maybe even give a talk? The first one was lots of fun.
I've added an entry about it on Upcoming.org too.
Ask Later #1 Video
For better or worse*, Toxi has the video.
He only caught the first half, but he got Steve's intro, Sean Varney on cyberscanning, me on stuff, Alex McLean on livecoding with Haskell, Rob McKinnon on Topic Maps, Steve on negative things, Matt Westcott on Sudoku hacking and most of Paul Hammond on product constraints. Hooray for partial documentation.
*Remember folks, the adrenalin kicks in pretty quickly at these talks so people get caught up in the heat of the moment. I seem to remember saying Schulze and Webb's metal phone was stupid, but I just meant that it's impractical and poisonous. Not the same thing at all...
Ask Later slides and notes
Notes from my Ask Later talk, One Should Not Think That These Are Two Separate Things, after the jump.
Ask Later #1
Last night was our first technology-themed 20x20 talk night (20 slides, 20 seconds each). Well done to Steve for getting it off the ground by organising the room and presiding over the slide collecting. The final line-up was as follows:
- Sean Varney spoke about data capture for film special effects and the progression from scanning 3D models and objects to scanning whole sets and people.
- I spoke about a few things that are connected by some of my favourite books. Slides to follow.
- Robert McKinnon spoke about topic maps and how del.icio.us and flickr are sneaking them in the back door.
- Alex McLean spoke about live-coding and his new project, a domain specific language for live-coding audio, written in Haskell.
- Steve Coast counterbalanced all the positive vibes with a talk about negative things.
- Matthew Westcott rocked the house with his poignant tale of home-grown Ruby OCR code for hacking an online Sudoku puzzle.
- Paul Hammond talked about the effect of constraints on creativity and productivity, by way of Scrum, Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.
- Jon Crowcroft gave us 9 (count them) levels of indirection, and wondered what would happen if football teams were programming languages.
- Simon Willison tried (and, I think, succeeded) to explain the whats, whys and hows of closures in Javascript.
- Yoz Grahame talked about the joys of cloning applications, by way of Ning, Second Life and LambdaMOO. With bunnies.
- Natalie Downe spoke about usability testing at torchbox, and some of the recent lessons learned.
- Muki Haklay spoke about usability testing for online mapping sites, and gave some pointers for the future.
- Tom Armitage reprised his talk from Reboot 8, making the case for telling stories with social software.
As we waited for people to arrive, Paul Mison played a bit of live Electroplankton on his Nintendo DS on the big screen, which worked really well (naturally, since it's designed for performance). I think we had about 30-40 people, plus speakers, and hopefully people enjoyed it enough that they'll come along again. We'll be starting a mailing list soon, so leave a comment here if you'd like to be notified when it's ready.
NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.
Techa Kucha Night becomes Ask Later
To avoid collisions with Pecha Kucha Night's UK trademark, in the future we won't be calling our event Techa Kucha Night. Nobody has specifically asked us to change, but a brief and civil exchange of emails with the London Pecha Kucha people has made it clear they'd rather we'd asked them first, which is fair enough.
In honour of this, and of our preference for leaving question time to the pub afterwards, we've changed the name of the night to Ask Later. I hope the topics remain sufficiently different between our night and the original architecture and design themed night so that there are no hard feelings. I can thoroughly recommend you check out the original Pecha Kucha - the next one in London is at the ICA on August 30th.
London Techa Kucha Night, 25th July
Enterprising chap that he is, Steve has booked a room at London Westminster University for what he's dubbed "Techa Kucha Night", a night of technology themed talks in the Pecha Kucha style* on Tuesday 25th July at 7pm. Entry is free, which is a bonus.
See Steve's post for more details, and please consider volunteering to give a talk (you'll be in illustrious company) as well as coming along and enjoying the fun. It should be a good night with a wide range of topics: basically, anything goes!
* that's 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, no more no less. A strict version of a lightning talk, if you will.
NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.
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