The Texas Advanced Computing Center has created an Advanced Visualization for the Humanities tool for a project A Thousand Words. The tool, called Most Pixels Ever: Cluster Edition is a library that extends Processing and is designed for large-scale tiled displays. Very neat.
In Dublin I heard DAH student Maura McDonnell present on Visual Music (her blog), which is her PdD research area. Visual Music is one term among many of experiments in light and sound and her blog is a nice collection of resources on this new media form.
From her blog I learned that there is a also a Center for Visual Music that has documentation and an online store.
Maura’s own work can be seen online, see Silk Chroma. The image above is taken from the Vimeo video.
Jennifer sent me a link to what sounds like a phenomenal Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis last summer. While I didn’t attend, I am watching the Eyeo2012 Vimeo channel. These are some of the most creative people at the intersection of art and computing.
From Humanist I just learned about Juxta Commons. This is a web version of the earlier downloadable Java tool. The new version still has the lovely interface that shows the differences between variants. The commons however, builds on the personal computer tool by being a place where collations can be kept. Others can find and explore your collations. You can search the commons and find collation projects.
Another interesting feature is that they have Google ads if you search the commons. The search is “powered by Google” so perhaps that comes with the service.
It has been apparently 20 years since the first text message was sent according to stories like this one, 20 Years Of Texting: The Rise And Fall Of LOL from Business Insider.
The first text message was sent on 3 December 1992, when the 22-year-old British engineer Neil Papworth used his computer to wish a “Merry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis, of Vodafone, on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. Papworth didn’t get a reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone in those days. That had to wait for Nokia’s first mobile phone in 1993.
What is interesting is that texting is declining. FT reports a “steep drop in festive Christmas and New Year text messaging this year…”. With smartphones that can do email, apps on smartphones, and plans that make it affordable to call, we have more and more choices. Soon l33t will become an endangered language.
One of the things I noticed about Japanese game culture when I was there was the importance of game centers or arcades. I ended up taking a number of pictures at some of the game centers I visited – see Arcade and Pachinko Flickr set. I’ve just found a great MA thesis by Eric Eickhorst on “Game Centers: A Historical and Cultural Analysis of Japan’s Video Amusement Establishments” (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Kansas, 2006). The thesis is a readable work that covers the history, the current state (as of 2006), Japanese attitudes and otaku culture. One interesting statistic he discusses has to do with housewives,
Surprisingly, the number one occupation listed by survey participants was housewife, representing 17.3% of the total number of respondents. This perhaps unexpected result merits a closer examination of the function of game centers for housewives. In response to the question of why they visited game centers, 38.6% of housewives replied that their intent was to change their mood or as a means of killing time, suggesting that such audiences may visit game centers as a way of taking a break from household duties. The function of changing one’s mood or killing time at a game center was the second most common response among all survey respondents, accounting for 32.0% of answers to that question. (p. 51-2)
Digital Humanities Quarterly has published our article on The Design of an International Social Media Event: A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities. This article documents the Day of Digital Humanities project that we have been running since 2009. Thanks to Peter for noticing.
Stéfan pointed me to this new visualization library, D3.js – Data-Driven Documents. The image above is from their Co-Occurrence Matrix (of characters in Les Misérables.) Here is what they say in the About:
D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
Take a look the examples Gallery. There are lots of ideas here for text visualization.
Faithful readers will have noticed that theoreti.ca has been inaccessible off and on since the summer and that it has not been updated for a while. The reason is that theoreti.ca was hacked and my ISP (rightly) insisted on shutting it down until I fixed it. Over the months I have tried a number of things that seemed to temporarily fix the problem, but ultimately failed. Finally I had to turn to a programmer, Hamman Samuel, who has rebuilt the blog from scratch and the associated philosophi.ca wiki. These were rebuilt on another server so there are various linking problems that we are slowly identifying and fixing. I will be reflecting on this experience in future posts. In the meantime I apologize to readers that it took so long to fix.
From Melissa and Twitter a great visualization of London Lives on the Line. It shows life expectancy and poverty by the tube stops of London. It shows the rhetorical power of visualization to connect data to our lives.