Stéfan pointed me to the AlchemyAPI service. AlchemyAPI provides an API for extracting “information about people, places, companies, topics, languages” and concepts. They have a nice demo on the front page where they take a news a top news story, extract the entities and then create a spring-loaded graph of the named entities.
You can see that for this story the system found organizations, a city, countries and persons.
A free API key is available for up to 30,000 calls a day.
I came across an artist, Sam Winston, whose work often explores language. For example Darwin (see image above) compares Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Ruth Padel’s Darwin, A Life In Poems.
Some of the panels/pages in Darwin are visualizations, even if hand drawn.
Many of his other works also play with language and language artifacts like Folded Dictionary.
50 Great Examples of Data Visualization is a nice summary of some of the most interesting visualizations. The emphasis seems to be on aesthetics rather than information exploration, but it is none-the-less a good place to start.
Thanks to Jean-Guy for this.
Judith sent me a link to a neat World Cup 2010 Calendar by MARCA.com. It provides a circular interface to all the different angle into the calendar of games for the World Cup.
Christian directed me to a fascinating chronology of information technology (in French) by Sylvie Fayet-Scribe. It is called Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information. and the web design isn’t the best, but it seems detailed and annotated. It seems like a good place to start if you want to understand the types of information aides from encyclopedias, indexes, and so on. Here division of time into epochs is also interesting. The bibliography is also good.
Well, we are starting up the second Day of Digital Humanities project. You are invited to participate!.
You can see what we did in last year’s project here. The idea was to have digital humanists blog one day of what they did and then combine it all into a dataset that can be studied. We call it “autoethnography of a community.” It was fascinating and stressful to run last year. I’m hoping I can enjoy it more this year.
The project will run on March 18th, 2010. We are hoping that we will get more graduate students and more colleagues from outside North America!
Scott Smallwood came to talk to our interactives group about his work on musical instruments. Scott was involved with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and demonstrated one of the hemispherical speakers that they designed so that laptop musicians could join and play with others. The idea was that a laptop musician, instead of plugging into a sound system (PA), should be able to make sound from where they are just like the analogue instruments. I wonder what the visualization equivalent is? Will these new pocket projectors we can begin to imagine visualization instrument that are portable. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry’s demo of SixthSense at TED is an example of creative thinking about outdoor interface.
Gizmodo has a short article on Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them. The article showcases graphic designs by Mark Coleran who did work for movies like Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith, and Children of Men. There is a screen reel that summarizes his work and he responds here in his blog. Thanks to Stan for this.
Googling around I came across a nice succinct chapter on Information Visualization for Text Analysis from a book called Search User Interfaces by Marti Hearst (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
The chapter goes from visualizations for text mining to concordances and then to citation relationships. It shows some of the usual suspects like TextArc and Wordle.
Thanks to Jason I discovered an interesting collection of animated poetry that plays with type by David Jhave Johnston. See glia — neuronal jelly with network sauce — 2009.. In theory you can embed the animated poems in things, but it didn’t work in this blog. Perhaps they are best seen in glia.
One feature of Johnston’s work is how he plays with type using, among other technologies, Mr. Softie from Obx Labs.