Category How To

Take Control of BBedit by Glenn Fleischman

Tibits Publishing’s latest Take Control volume provides a starter to power-user tour of Bare Bones Software’s BBedit. This short volume by Glenn Flesihman provides a concise, focused and well delivered guide to get the most out of BBedit – one…

Book of CSS3 by Peter Gasston

This book is just chock full of goodness. Not only does the Book of CSS3 by Peter Gasston provide a thoughtful introduction to the latest and greatest power of CSS3 (the history and background of which is covered superbly), it…

Javascript Step by Step by Steve Suehring

Yes, another tutorial based guide to JavaScript. Does the world need another one? Do you need another one? Well, it’s made it to a second edition, there must be something to that. At least that was what made it worth…

Mashing Without Code

It's got a great search engine, and it will map your selections on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) listings in the area of the listing you have chosen. ... : Daft.ie for data Dapper.com to create a dymanic RSS feed Yahoo Pipes to geocode and output a further feed Yahoo Maps because that's what Pipes works with The first step is to construct the target properties from daft.ie. ... Viewing the My Daft page then provides non-paged view of your properties and gives the data (albeit in a relatively unstructured form) needed to build a custom feed from.

Comparing Word Clouds

Taking a look at a chart of common words and their frequency of use is a first attempt at this. tapor.jpg A similar chart was created showing me words that appeared only in one or the another and I was immediately struck by the fact that campus didn't occur at all in the McMaster announcement, where it was the most frequent word at Guelph. ... By choosing to upload only the text of the announcements themselves (And thus help the tool know just what is important to me) I can get the results I want to consider. tapor2.jpg Voila! ... I want to consider this further, but I am far more a visual thinker, and while these bar charts are pleasing, and take a wealth of data and distill it to a very nice summary, I want to take it one step further.

Keeping a Few Social Network Tools in Your Kitbag

However, as I laid out the map, I was in manual mode and although aided by the visual, the growing complexity of the chart suggested that my free-form approach had really skipped the possibility that all this wonderful graph theory that I am vaguely aware of might actually have a role to play. ... The resulting list in DOT looked something like this: digraph unix { node [shape=rectangle, color=orange, style=filled]; "Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 1921-1972" -> "Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI) 1974 - 1981" ; "Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 1921-1972" -> "Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) 1974 - 1981"; "Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 1921-1972" -> "Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) 1960s - 1971" ; "Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 1966 -" -> "Shankhill Defense Association (SDA) 1969 -" ; "Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (1974 -)" -> "Ulster Special Constabulary Association (USCA)" ; "Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (1974 -)" -> "Ulster Volunteer Service Corps (UVSC)" ; } A simple start and as you can see, DOT is not too complex. ... In a perfect world, this would actually be applicable to my dissertation work as well, as opposed to squirreling away a few precious hours of time I should be spending on writing about Canadian tavernkeepers ;-) Hopefully this provides a little bit of insight a to what tools are easily accessible to take relationships and represent them visually - tools which don't demand that you learn the finer points of graph theory, but do in fact allow you leverage them to appreciate the intricacies of large social networks.

Turkel on Flux

Bill Turkel has written a thought provoking post at Digital History Hacks calling for a re-conception of how we ‘do’ history. He summarizes his understanding of the conventional process involving measured, concrete steps, that unfortunately presuppose that time essentially stands…

This Cornell Note-Taking Thing

Last week I pointed readers to the excellent article by Dustin Wax comparing note-taking methodologies and weighing the pros and cons of a couple techniques. I was not personally aware of the Cornell method. I am however a big fan…

Notetaking

I threw this link into an aside, and then thought better of it. It might get lost there, and this latest post from the consistently pragmatic Dustin Wax on Taking Better Notes has a plethora of great tips. He also…

If I Knew Then What I Know Now…

The tentative title for post this was how to get ahead by really trying, but I thought this might actually sounds a little too preachy. Without making this too much of a habit (stealing from another’s hard work), Dustin Wax…

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…