Barry Cornelius has produced an interesting “railroad” visualization of the TEI content models. See TV: the TEI Visualizer. This is from TEI-L the Text Encoding Initiative list.
Thanks to Peter Boot for correcting me on who created this.
Walter Rafelsberger: Rhizome Navigation
Walter Rafelsberger sent me a note about a project similar to the Pathway project I blogged. His project is Rhizome Navigation lets one navigate a space of wiki page titles or blogs in 3d. It uses access logs so it can, I assume, show how users navigate. Very neat – try the demo.
CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference
I’m at the CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference at the University of New Brunswick. So far it is a gem of a conference. You can see my conference notes (as they emerge) at CaSTA 06 Conference report. Vika Zafrin has blog entries on the talks at Words End.
Haefner: Kite Aerial Photography
Kite Aerial Photography is a photography site by by Scott Haefner that includes 360 degree panoramas taken from kites. Haefner is a professional photographer and site designer whose site also describes the equipment needed to kite aerial photography. The site itself, along with its companion on his Ground-based Photography, is an example of a well designed photo site. Thanks to Shawn for this.
Electronic Textual Editing
Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Keefe, and John Unsworth, (MLA, 2006) is out. Preprint versions of the essays (in TEI XML) show the scope of the collection. It goes from practical “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions” to theoretical essays like “Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon”.
Thanks to Judy for this.
Feature: Columbine RPG Creator Talks About Dawson Shooting – Kotaku
Columbine RPG Creator Talks About Dawson Shooting is an interview with Danny Ledonne about Super Columbine Massacre RPG and the Kimveer Gill incident. Thanks to Robert’s comment on my previous entry for pointing to this.
I’m of two minds reading this interview. On the one hand Danny Ledonne seems sincere and thoughtful, on the other hand, he doesn’t really explain why he had to create a game about Columbine just because it was such an important event. Probably like most of us he had mixed intentions (and didn’t think to hard about them in the moment) and now is trying to justify what he did retrospectively. Ultimately, of course, all he did was create a game, not shoot anyone, so lets not confuse levels of responsibility. That said, it seems that everyone who wants to justify their creations resorts to claims about deeper messages that are overlooked.
Pathway – Wikipedia Visualization
Pathway is a small custom application (just for Max OS X) that creates a visualization while you browse the Wikipedia. It is not a general pupose browser, it is just for the Wikipedia, but it includes some nice features for reflecting on the “path” you take through the wiki. I should note that paths are a feature Vannevar Bush talked about in “As We May Think” (Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.)
This comes from Matt.
Crazy Egg – visualize usage
When I was showing students the Nielsen F-Pattern Alertbox one of them pointed me to Crazy Egg ‚Äì visualize your visitors – a neat service that watches user’s clicks on your pages and then shows you the results in overlays like the heatmap example here.
TiddlyWiki
Shawn recently introduced me to TiddlyWiki, which Stéfan Sinclair has also blogged. It is a web page (with over 5000 lines of code) that acts as a wiki if you have write priviledges to the file. It is an extremely smart and simple tool that I don\’t really think of as a wiki since it really is more like a web page application for private and local use. You can use it to keep notes on your local computer just by saving an empty page.
I have the feeling there is a principle to technologies like TiddlyWiki – simple objects that are both application and data, documents that carry the smarts needed so you don\’t need a separate application (well actually you do need a browser.) Reminds me of the document-centric view of OpenDoc that Apple tried unsuccessfully to promote. What other TiddlyWiki like doc/apps can we imagine:
- A Curriculum Vitae that one can add items to and reorganize in different views.
- A Bibliography that lets you maintain references and then export them.
- A Analyze Me TiddlyWiki that lets you paste in data (or text) to study and then lets you run analysis on it to get results that become part of the document
Nielsen: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
There is an F-Shaped Pattern to the way users read the web according to one of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox columns on usability. The Alertbox reports on a study that used eye tracking to see where users looked on a web page.
The study has implications for writing for the web if Nielsen is right that viewers typically scan a page in an “F” pattern where they scan a couple times horizontally and then vertically down.