Archives for category: HCI
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Digging into Digging into Data Books: A Couple Choice Volumes for Data Visualisation

15 July 2010 //
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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. R in a Nutshell

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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Categories HCI, Info Architecture, Visualization

Of Mice and Me

4 December 2007 //
0

I feared the track­pad. I am not the biggest fan of the track­pad. I gather that my name­sake, the CTO at Syn­aptics is respons­ible for some of the biggest break­throughs as the track­pad gained laptop cred dur­ing the 1990’s and trackpoint.jpgso I feel a little loy­alty if only by asso­ci­ation. How­ever, my favour­ite means of input is the Track­Point — the little red nubby (that becomes less red real fast) that the IBM Think­Pad is most closely asso­ci­ated with. This is a very per­sonal area. I know many users that could just not get used to using a single fin­ger on an ultra-sensitive tiny joy­stick. The cursor and they could not become friends with the Track­Point in the equa­tion. Ran­dom sur­vey indic­ates most people still carry a mouse with them and con­nect it — this is the case for Track­Point as well as track­pad users. I am glan­cing around the cof­fee shop right now and frankly I am the only one rely­ing on the built in track­ing device. There’s a lot of users with big mice and small mice, but mice non­ethe­less. There is even a user care­fully bal­an­cing one on the arm of an easy chair — that can’t pos­sibly be com­fort­able. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Apple, HCI, Lenovo, Technology

Open Source Genealogy

21 May 2007 //
3

I have been search­ing for ways to improve my gene­a­lo­gical research. I set two spe­cific cri­teria for my search:

  • A cross-platform browser/editor that uses GEDCOM files natively;
  • A means to share gene­a­lo­gical data in a free and open manner

phpged.jpgTwo open source products have emerged that work together to meet my needs: PHP­GED­Viewer (PGV) and Gen­esis (an open source PGV research tool) part of the Dis­trib­uted Fam­ily Tree Pro­ject. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Genealogy, HCI, Info Architecture

Going Plazes 2.0

20 May 2007 //
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plazes.gif

One of the more intriguing social net­work­ing applic­a­tions that I have been enjoy­ing over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my ini­tial exper­i­ences with this spa­tial addi­tion to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyber­space IP to place you in phys­ical space. If you are at a pre­vi­ously defined Plaze, then you are pin­pointed. If you have dis­covered a new place, you sup­ply some info about the place, refine the loc­a­tion and it is stored for future ref­er­ence. You can dis­cover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recom­men­ded and you can also get a Traze (a spa­tial and tem­poral indic­a­tion of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze your­self or to find nearby plazes. The sys­tem works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog read­ers show­ing where you are in real time –-> see my own side­bar. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cartography, HCI, Maps, Social Network Analysis

Putting the Game into Shopping

26 February 2007 //
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I observed my first Smack­Shop­ping live inter­net game show today. Build­ing on the last minute bid­ding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of com­mit­ted pur­chasers, Jelly­Fish offers an intriguing experience.

smackshop.gifAs a semi-standard demand con­sol­id­ator, Jelly­Fish has agree­ments with a wide range of nor­mal retail­ers who con­tract to provide X amount of dis­count for bulk orders facil­it­ated by Jelly­Fish. Pur­chases earn the dis­count with is split 50/50 with the Jelly­Fish buyer. So there is a buy­ing incent­ive through Jelly­Fish. But what makes this fun???

Well, for peri­ods through­out the day, there is a real time games how. ‘Play­ers’ (any Jelly­Fish user) vote on par­tic­u­lar products that they’d really like to buy. When the show starts, the product dis­count increases until the fixed num­ber of units are sold. The game involves try­ing to be the last buyer in and there­fore get the highest dis­count before the deal is done. The top play­ers are then ranked and points are awar­ded based on the top ten fin­ish­ers. In addi­tion, observ­ers can guess at what the final dis­cout will be and get a chance to spin a vir­tual roul­ette wheel to win an addi­tional prize.

In the game that I observed, buy­ers were after a Play­Sta­tion 2 game which in the end went at about a 45% dis­count. The closest guesser then spun the wheel and it landed on SmackShop’s choice. They gave him $50, but pos­sible prizes ranged from a Wii, to vari­ous other elec­tronic doodads in the $250–500 range.

Its pretty easy to see how this game can become addict­ive for those who crave a good deal. It also has a lot to say about the future of shop­ping. The idea of con­sol­id­at­ing demand and get­ting retail­ers to bid for your busi­ness has been explored using the net by a vari­ety of star­tups over the past few years. The inter­est­ing thing about Smack Shop­ping is that is that it puts the game right up front, and pin­points that which makes the eBay exper­i­ence excit­ing and fun. The other aggreg­at­ors made their inten­tion to deliver shop­ping value clear, but per­haps failed to note that the thrill of the deal is the sweet spot and if you can play it up, you can make a killing yourself.

Lucky for me, Cana­dians can only wtch Smack Show for now. They prom­ise to open it up to Canucks soon, but right now as many mer­chants will not ship to Canada they have a made a blanket rule. Cana­dians can use nor­mal Jelly Fish shop­ping, and determ­ine whether indi­vidual mer­chants will ship to Canada.

Categories HCI, Marketing, Social Network Analysis

Multi-Touch and Some Other Cool Things

14 February 2007 //
0

Ok. This guy is into some cool, cool stuff. Jeff Han has a num­ber of very impress­ive short movies of some of the fas­cin­at­ing pro­to­types. Not only Multi-Touch (which the iPhone has sud­denly become most pub­licly asso­ci­ated with), but some very inter­est­ing work using LEDS as pho­to­di­odes, and his media mir­ror which pitched as art­work, but is a very inter­est­ing exten­sion of the multi-touch reflect­ive feed­back. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Aesthetics, Apple, HCI, Technology

A Fascinating Constellation

8 January 2007 //
1

visualisation.gifThis con­stel­la­tion of research­ers work­ing in over­lap­ping fields of know­ledge, inform­a­tion, soft­ware and data visu­al­iz­a­tion is a great jump­ing off spot. <a href=“http://www.visual-literacy.org/” target=“_blank””>Visual-Literacy.org is a col­lect­ive course span­ning sev­eral insti­tu­tions and involving a num­ber of lead­ers in the field of visu­al­isa­tion. Sounds rather cool. As part of their pro­spectus they have con­struc­ted ‘maps’ of the visu­al­isa­tion con­stel­la­tion as geo-spatial map, peri­odic table, and a syl­lo­gism. This is a real practise/preach exer­cise and a won­der­ful over­view of the wide range of activ­it­ies in this field and their inter-relations. The peri­odic table is par­tic­u­larly impress­ive. Hover will popup a graph­ical rep­res­ent­a­tion of the tech­nique noted. The syl­lo­gism makes a lot of sense. The peri­odic table must be com­pli­men­ted for the breadth of inform­a­tion con­veyed and the attempt to sys­tem­at­ize the volume. The table itself is a bit of a chal­lenge to use and the meta­phor of peri­odic table ques­tion­able, but a pointer in an inter­est­ing direction.

Categories Aesthetics, Cartography, HCI, Info Architecture, Maps, Social Network Analysis

Do Ten Years Make a Difference?

3 January 2007 //
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emate300mp2000small.gifIt is inter­est­ing to con­sider the vastly dif­fer­ent (yet sim­il­arly tar­geted) Apple eMate of 1997 and the OLPC pof 2007. Float­ing about the inter­net cur­rently is a really cool screen cap­ture of the ‘Sugar’ inter­face used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pro­ject. OLPC seems to have stuck for the last little while. I know that for a time the pro­ject seems to have had a new name every week. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Apple, HCI, Technology

Respect for Pages

12 December 2006 //
0

Here’s a thought pro­vok­ing piece of tech­no­logy in action…bookscan.gifbut what is par­tic­u­larly intriguing is that it is rep­lic­at­ing the human action of turn­ing pages “so as to avoid hav­ing to dam­age the bind­ing.” It of course begs the ques­tion over how user-defined the nature of the prin­ted media is, but cer­tainly rep­res­ents a won­der­ful adapt­a­tion of machine to the task at hand. Click the photo to go to the manufacturer’s site — there a really cool anim­ated gif of the machine actu­ally read­ing a book. A task it accom­plishes at the rate of 2,400 pages per hour.

Categories Furniture, HCI, Technology

Social Lending — Empowerment?

27 November 2006 //
1

zopaIs this an up and com­ing phe­nom? Zopa and Prosper are two two star­tups offer­ing to bring together bor­row­ers and lenders and offer . The sense of ‘Sim­ness’ (as in simcity/sim this sim that) is an inter­est­ing note. … As the author of this sur­vey on these two ser­vices note, they even add fun to the act of bor­row­ing and lending…quite an accomplishment.

Categories Business Idea, Ethics, HCI, Social Network Analysis
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