Making Your Data Sing

Today I had a won­der­ful dis­cus­sion with Fernanda Vié­gas and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg of IBM’s Visual Com­mu­nic­a­tions Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes web­site that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launch­ing their site, they have been hard at work bring­ing us new means of visu­al­iz­ing data­sets and provid­ing a …

Wikis for Notes

I am a big fan of wikis for note-taking, research mater­ial col­la­tion and organ­iz­a­tion. There are a wide vari­ety of easy to use, free wiki ser­vices online and an increas­ing num­ber of small foot­print, simple stan­dalone wikis. I prob­ably should have blogged about this earlier and shared some of my exper­i­ences, but an excel­lent article …

Virtual Metro

Hav­ing just returned from one of my favour­ite cit­ies in the world, I was fas­cin­ated to find a Paris Metro Vir­tual Exper­i­ence. This media-rich site offers won­der­ful his­tory of the Paris Metro and the oppor­tun­ity to take a vir­tual tour with static images and rel-time soundtrack along a num­ber of lines. Addi­tion­ally, the author of …

Extending Firefox

I don’t nor­mally blog about Fire­fox exten­sions. I have far too many installed, but this latest one is some­thing that should have been a part of Fire­fox on install. If you are run­ning Fire­fox, you owe your­self to test this one out. Thumb­strips allows you to view your brows­ing his­tory as a series of small …

Medieval Crime and the Modern Database

I atten­ded a great talk by Steven Bed­narski of St. Jerome’s Uni­ver­sity today. His CV lists UQAM, York, Toronto as places of exper­i­ence. His fram­ing ques­tion today: How does a social his­tor­ian make use of a research data­base? Bed­narski explains that he was trained in the French school and con­siders him­self a storyteller by practise. …

The Series is Over. Long Live the Digital Model!

Those clever folks at the IATH at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia are receiv­ing much deserved accol­ades for their truly breath­tak­ing digital model of ancient Rome. Rome Reborn 1.0 (and accom­pa­ny­ing web­site) are visu­ally stun­ning and the main­stream media are cov­er­ing this with great detail. Billed as the largest digital model of an his­toric city ever …

The Perpetual Excitement of a Jobs Keynote

So, another Steve Jobs/Apple key­note over and the hype of the advance pun­dits leaves one feel­ing a might let down. This is the first key­note that I can recall that sparked main­stream news cov­er­age in advance. I was watch­ing my local news sta­tion this morn­ing and they gave Steve & Co., at least 30 seconds …

Pull to Push and Back to Pull Again

The Black­berry was cool because it brought us push versus pull email…realistically RIM was doing the pulling for you and push­ing it to you. As an email noti­fic­a­tion popped up as I was trolling through my RSS feeds, it sud­denly struck me that these are now com­pet­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion tools for me. The shift to RSS …

Google Quick Visualization for Historians

A year ago I wrote a recipe for the TAPoR pro­ject to demon­strate a way for his­tor­i­ans to util­ize text ana­lysis tools to plumb his­tor­ical data from Google. In the recipe a user aggreg­ated search res­ults from Google and used the TAPoR DateFinder tool to rap­idly con­struct a chro­no­logy. This rather basic oper­a­tion has now …

Open Testing 2.0

Tan­gler offers an innov­at­ive approach to open test­ing of online products. A com­bin­a­tion of instant mes­saging and real-time for­ums, Tan­gler provides a repos­it­ory of join­able dis­cus­sions and archives dis­cus­sions for ref­er­ence. The site seems geared towards test­ing of new products in an inter­act­ive envir­on­ment, but noth­ing pre­cludes dis­cus­sion around any topic from the eso­teric to …