I had the privilege of chairing a symposium organized by the Irish Manuscript Commission which invited participants from a variety of Irish cultural institutions to discuss issues arising from the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement. Presentations from Jill Cousins, Director of Europeana and her colleagues, Georgia Angelaki, Paul Keller and Lucie Guibault sought to bring clarity to the new agreement and the issues emerging from the online presentation of digital cultural artefacts. Read the rest of this entry »
strikingly random thoughts and 'maximum data existentialisation'
Archives for category: Info Architecture
The premise of the Information Diet by Clay Johnson is: ‘What if we started managing our information consumption like we managed our food consumption?’ And so it begins. This is a fascinating book framed as an open discussion in which Johnson carries along this metaphor of information intake being likened to nutritional sustenance. The initial chapters explore overeating and the obesity of America, but the reader is increasingly wondering how far the author planning on carrying this overeating consumption metaphor. As the narrative starts to move into the realm of information provision and the ‘industrialization of information’ the author’s intentions become clearer. The case study of AOL’s Blogsmith software that allows for the measurement of information’s impact on revenue and profitability highlights is quite fascinating and paints a picture of information becoming turned into ‘fast food’ — that is easily absorbed, desired, but of limited or destructive nutritional value. Read the rest of this entry »
The *Big* Data Glossary is actually a relatively *short* book, best enjoyed as an eBook in my estimation. This volume is similar to a number of recent releases from O’Reilly that have moved from being deep and comprehensive to providing a higher-level taste-test overview from a more conceptual standpoint. In this instance, the Big Data Glossary by Pete Warden could also be described as an annotated bibliography of the variety of tools and platforms recently emerged to work with linked data or large and rich datasets.
What a great excursion down a wonderful project! A lovely, short, step-by-step brief, DIY Bookbinding by Brian Sawyer inspires the reader to attempt their own bookbinding project. Although only 32 pages in length, the author makes the process of binding together a collection of magazines into a durable hardcover tome quite approachable and achievable.
I was intrigued by an offhand reference to a ‘neat new service’ and consequently poked into infostripe. It’s a consolidated touchpoint for sharing your social media participation and identities in a compact and dynamic manner. Similar to some extent to about.me, it draws upon a certain amount of your digital narcissism. The biggest difference between about.me and infostripe appears to be in the flavour: about.me takes a very aesthetic-centred approach, where infostripe is deeply rich in content and concise presentation. About.me demands more manual creation of the information used to describe you, where infostripe attempts to automate this process by building a profile based on what you are contributing to the social mediashpere.
The R Cookbook by Paul Teetor is a solid addition to the well respected series. Teetor provides a rich collection of useful examples written in the proven method and covering everything from installing, configuring and running R to carrying out sophisticated statistical analysis tasks that demonstrate the power of R. The book is targeted at a wide audience from R novice eager to just start playing in R to more experienced practitioners looking to hone and round out their R repertoire.
In The Art of Community, Jono Bacon tackles the task of explaining how to attract, build and maintain productive collaborative online communities. Bacon has had impressive credentials to author such a book and draws from his experience skillfully. With over ten years experience in the open source community he has the hands-on experience with initiatives such as community manager for Ubuntu, KDE and OpenAdvantage.
The book is organised logically with a healthy selection of applied chapters in designing a strategy, understanding the sociological aspects behind community formation, through understanding community health and dealing with issues that arise. Read the rest of this entry »
The Map Your Moves Challenge fascinates me. New York’s Public Radio station WNYC has devised a data visualisation challenge for their listeners. Curious about what makes people move from and to their community they polled stories from their listeners and collected them into a structured dataset and have released it into the wild. Now this is very cool…they want to take real stories and understand how these stories interact and how they can learn about their own community from them. Absolutely brilliant!
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. 
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.
Eric Fischer has posted a new series of visualisations ‘Locals and Tourists’ depicting the location of photos taken in urban areas around the world. In this 
series he attempts to distinguish between those taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month) and those by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.
What immediately struck me was his ingenious re-use of the existing data to create new information. By exploring individuals posted pictures over time he was able to hypothesise as to whether they were visiting or residing in a particular area. This allowed for a means to compare the gaze of the two groups.
I immediately started to explore his map of Dublin to see if any patterns emerged and then to try and suggest explanations for them. There is a healthy and regular mix of photos by both groups in the central core, but immediately to the east is a large blue box of photos taken by locals. It appears to surround the new Aviva Lansdowne Stadium in Ballsbridge. Additionally on the northside the National Botanical Gardens have a heavy concentration of photographs by locals.
The most practical application of Locals versus tourists is to consider how a visitor might use these visualisations to find the hidden city known only to its inhabitants — to find those secret spots worthy of capture by locals, but seemingly missed in the tourist guides.
This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geotaggers’ World Atlas’ looking at from where the pictures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.