Comments for Mixing and Remixing Information

Comment on Class Projects by Mixing and Remixing Information » class project descriptions for S-10

Mixing and Remixing Information » class project descriptions for S-10 — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:25:58 +0000

[...] See http://blog.mixingandremixing.info/s10/class-projects/. [...]

Comment on Day 12 notes by emily

emily — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:44:42 +0000

Notes from Ben Shneiderman’s “Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think” lecture:
~So Ben founded the HCI Lab at the Univ of Maryland many years ago
~Book: Readings in Information Visualization: Using Visions to Think by Card, MacKinlay, and Shneiderman
~Visualization supports discovery and communication
~ManyEyes: a web service where you upload your data and play with different visualizations
~Spotfire: multiple windows for multiple visualizations, only 1 dataset though
~Lessons learned from information visualization: 1. Start with the information Overview, 2. Zoom & filter, 3. Details-on-demand
~Multi-var: Spotfire, Taleau, GGobi, TableLens, ParCoords
~Temporal: Lifelines, TimeSearcher, Palantir, DataMontage
~Tree: Cone/Cam/Hyperbolic, SpaceTree, Treemap
~Network: Pajek, JUNG, UCINet, SocialAction, NodeXL
~also, infosthetics.com, flowingdata.com, infovis.org, http://www.infovis.net/index.php?lang=2
~Tree Map example: http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market able to easily pick out outliers
~Network visualization: showed an example of Social Action network analysis and senate voting alliances in 2007
~Ben was a big proponent or clarity in network visualization. Overly artistic design obscures the possibility for discovery.

Comment on Spring 2010 by ddt

ddt — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:56:03 +0000

(Note: sorry, blog wasn’t letting me log in last night.)

Sketching out possible UIs has helped me realize how I need to narrow down the scope of this project, as well as get a proof-of-concept “1.0″ version running while I specify how to generalize for further versions.

What problem is your project aimed at solving? Alternatively, why would someone want to use what you are making in your project?

My project is aimed at being an ancillary tool after the CA Redistricting project. Though I’ve since found that the redistricting in only concerned with balancing new districts by population (how many people, only) info to be gathered in the 2010 Census, policy people might be interested in seeing how districts have changed in economic, racial, education, and other compositions over the last few decades.

Perhaps even using a time slider to show a change in “heat maps” after users have selected one or two criteria, would give a good visualization of these changes.

Is your project doable given the constraints of time, our starting knowledge, etc?

Narrowing the scope and learning as much from existing tools will be key in this.

What interface are you imagining? Is it a web, desktop, or mobile
application? What platform are you running?

As I mentioned in my early proposal, I’d want this to be a web-based tool, so that anyone can access it. The data are all public, so that shouldn’t be a bar.

Do the APIs you plan to use actually support the functionality that you need in your application? Show how it does so.

The trick will be translating the proprietary map formats to something readily available for web-based mapping and presentation tools. Am looking into that.

What programming language do you plan to use?

Still thinking about it, though I have seen a terrific JavaScript map visualization tool. Not that I know and JavaScript, but I am recruiting a CS person to help with this.

Tentative Action Plan
Step 1: Corner elusive policy people and get best suggestions from them about what data they’d most like to see visualized.

Step 2: Learn more about the map data formats, and how to break them out of application-based presentation.

Step 3: Go through existing map visualization tools. Steal what I can.

Step 4: Get a display of one district map up and running.

Step 5: Prototype UI widgets that will overlay demographic data (initially only one option) on map.

Step 6: Add options to UI widgets. Test color/pattern combinations.

High-Risk Areas/Questions
1. This may end up being relatively trivial use to the Redistricting Commission, as they are tightly constrained simply by number of population.

2. My CS help may get overwhelmed with other projects, leaving me a bit stranded by my over-reach.

Comment on s10-Day 06 Introduction to the Flickr API by ayushk

ayushk — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:39:44 +0000

1. My search term was: “Cheese Board”

The URL is: http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=49558a325ba45b1be2b906471622caa6&tags=Cheese+Board

The URL for the context page is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11954314@N04/4380341000

The URL for the medium-sized photo is: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4071/4380341000_f8c0c54cf0.jpg

2. I wanted to see who represents Alpine, NJ – the richest neighborhood in the US. (07620)

http://services.sunlightlabs.com/api/legislators.allForZip.xml?apikey=2a05bacddb4a456da41e00607b194865&zip=07620

Results:

Robert Menendez – M000639
E. Scott Garett – G000548
Frank R. Launtenberg – L000123

Comment on s10-Day 07 Setting up for programming / APIs cont by raymondyee

raymondyee — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:32:40 +0000

Dan — frankly, I don’t know why

http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?w=all&q=Mixing+and+Remixing+Information

http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=mixingandremixinginfo10

doesn’t work.

This question is worth posting on the help sections of Flickr.

Comment on s10-Day 07 Setting up for programming / APIs cont by ddt

ddt — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:46:10 +0000

Wait, why doesn’t this work?

http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=mixingandremixinginfo10

Comment on S10 Programming Setup by ddt

ddt — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:45:51 +0000

Is it telling too much to say you need to redo the permissions change as a final-final step?

Comment on s10-Day 07 Setting up for programming / APIs cont by ddt

ddt — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:28:24 +0000

Only took me an hour to realize that the REST request format (at http://www.flickr.com/services/api/request.rest.html) is incomplete… yay, documentation!

Comment on S10 Programming Setup by ddt

ddt — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:54:48 +0000

Yup, seems you (or I, at least) need to be on AirBears.

In Step 1, there needs to be a space after “cd” and before the tilde.

Comment on S10 Programming Setup by ddt

ddt — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:18:05 +0000

So, I’ve been trying to ssh into ischool.berkeley.edu and people.ischool.berkeley.edu using Terminal, Fugu, Transmit. On two different computers. I get all sorts of errors, but no access. Is this something we can do only when on AirBears? I don’t think that should be the case… .