FreeMind is free Mind Mapping software that works on most platforms. It has cool feature where it can create navigable map of your file structure. The .mm files are XML so one should be able to do other sorts of transformations on them.
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Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager
Steve Ramsay turned me on to a fascinating diachronic name visualization, The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager. You can type in your name and see its rise and fall over time. Can we create a distribution graph of the top 1000 words in a text like this?
lavalife: Where Canadian singles go
The Globe and Mail has a story by Dr. Jean Marmoreo, “You can speed up love” (Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005, page F7) about older newly single women who are “slicing time” and using lavalife.com to meet other singles. The article and the web site claims that 8 million Canadians have accounts on lavalife, an extraordinary number. Dr. Marmoreo talks about slicing time – not having the time to mess around when you are a professional with children and therefore using web dating services.
Style.org, State of the Union visulization
Thanks to StÈfan Sinclair for pointing out a neat data graphics site, Style.org. Their most recent project, Parsing the State of the Union” href=”http://www.style.org/stateoftheunion/”>style.org >Parsing the State of the Union allows you to see Bush’s State of the Union addresses as prospect with sentences coloured that contain a search word. Very effective visualization.
What matters
Christopher Alexander is his 1996 talk to OOPSLA on The Origins of Pattern Theory ends by calling on programmers to reconceive what they are doing with a view to the living good.
It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.
New media and multimedia likewise have to ask about the ethics of what we do. Are multimedia designers just the rhetors of the digital age – packaging the message of anyone who pays to be as entertaining as possible? Or, are we committeed to coding a living world along with programmers?
Pattern Languages
Unless you’ve been asleep, you will have noticed the spread of Christopher Alexander’s pattern theory through computing. In The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World (a talk given in San Jose, California, at the 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA)) he reflects on the theory and how it has taken root in computing.
The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.
Iain (M) Banks: Feersum Endjinn
Feersum Endjinn by Iain (aka Iain M.) Banks is the best sci-fi novel I’ve read in a while. Ian M. Banks is a Scottish fiction and science fiction writer. His sci-fi goes under “Iain M. Banks” and his straight fiction under “Iain Banks”. Feersum Endjinn is in that Brit dark fantasy/sci fi style of Mervyn Peake and later Pullman. It is tough to read with one narrator whose sections read in something like l33t speak. The world of Feersum Endjinn is an outsized castle where ruined rooms are broad fields or cities and there is a data corpus that anyone not too senior is implanted to be able to access. Citizens have multiple lives, both real and then virtual. Every page slowed me down with twisted insights or insights that twisted. Easily one of the most imaginative writers, though sometimes I worry M-Banks loses his plot in the display of wit and the fantastic. Just think about the title of the book.
Continue reading Iain (M) Banks: Feersum Endjinn
Using TACT with Electronic Texts (for free)
Using TACT with Electronic Texts, a classic introduction and manual is now available for free as a PDF from the MLA! The MLA and the authors (Ian Lancashire et. al.) should be congratulated for putting this up. Even if you don’t use TACT the opening chapters are relevant to anyone interested in text analysis. Bravo! This is thanks to Judith Altreuter.
PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004
Jay Rosen’s blog on the press and media has a nice entry on PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004. The top ten ideas are:
1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: "My readers know more than I do."
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. "Content will be more important than its container."
7. "What once was good–or good enough–no longer is."
8. "The victory of affinity over geography."
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community.There are explanations or links to blog entries that explain these. It is a great way to summarize a year of ideas. More generally Rosen’s blog does a good job of linking to highlights of ideas and short essays. His blog seems a good example of a blog made up of short essays rather than just links.
Podcasting: audio for your iPod
The Globe and Mail has a good story from the Associated Press on ‘Podcasting’ lets masses do radio shows (Matthew Fordahl, Monday, Feb. 7, 2005). The story gives some history and describes some of the uses of postcasting. For more see iPodder.org.
Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it’s enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.