Tags:data visualization, Wikipedia, world history.
I dig the idea behind how this is built. Wikipedia isn’t the end-all-be-all source of infallible information, but it certainly provides great snapshot overviews on any topic. Why not look to it for a historical snapshot? This visualization is beautifully executed, both visually and technically. The creators’ description provides more details below the video.
A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.
Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.
This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.
More information and datasets: http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/
Posted on 13 April '11 by Matylda, under General. No Comments.
Tags:apps, innovation, instagram, Mobile, photography, Social Networking, startups.
I’m late to the Instagram party (I define late as discovering my first name has already been claimed as a username; if you’re curious I’m grabbed Tylda instead) and I’m hooked. Its simplicity makes discovering images a joy and its community is overwhelmingly positive, lacking the anonymous trolls that usually plague public comment threads.
And, while photos can be posted to multiple other social networks, those connections are not visible to other users, putting the focus squarely on photography. On Instagram, who you are is defined only by how you see the world, a refreshing departure from most social networks profiles.
Most people share photos and interact with others through comments and likes. One user, @assingm3nt, innovatively built a community around his account, posting topics for photo contests to his followers and highlighting the most interesting submissions with a followup photo:
Instagram might not have predicted this use case. That’s one of the fun surprises about building something: You never know how users will interact with your product. If you listen, you can find inspiration to improve, or just enjoy the innovation.
Posted on 29 March '11 by Matylda, under Mobile, Start-ups. No Comments.
Tags:circle calendar, design.
I came across this circle calendar template someone created in Google docs. Unfortunately it’s hard to add dates in digitally, but worth finding a printer if you’re doing some long-term planning. Good design can make even the most familiar things more interesting.
Posted on 20 March '11 by Matylda, under General. No Comments.
Tags:data, social media.
I use Google Docs frequently, especially for collaborative projects, and I have what seems like a gazillion of them organized into collections in my account. Many of the docs shared with have long been inactive, but I keep them around because I’ve forgotten they exist. I’m not alone in this habit, and it makes for an interesting data trail.
Social network sharing has quickly become a daily habit for many, but most are self-aware, if not self-censoring, about what they post. We post things we expect an audience to see, whether it’s global or restricted. In a way it’s like performing on stage, where you can gauge audience reactions, often receiving instant feedback and adjusting accordingly.
The social part of “social media” implies that we know we’re being watched, and recognize a few of the faces in the crowd. You can learn a decent amount about a person by their social media activity, but it’s more like watching a rehearsed speech than witnessing an improvised performance.
Over time, the most mundane moments can become the most significant. So much subtle data is stored in emails and shared documents. Those are the interactions we engage in more casually, where we let our guard down more quickly, where more of our core self surfaces. Moments when we forget there’s an audience are what make candid photographs so compelling.
When Facebook relaunched their inbox, I was shown a message I sent five years ago that I didn’t remember composing. What will I have forgotten in 20 years? Services like MemoLane address this question by pulling social media streams into an explorable timeline. It may be fascinating to scroll through timelines made public by people who’ve used social media since childhood (or before, if they have parents who shared their ultrasound on Facebook).
In the Analog Ages, private thoughts to friends and notes to coworkers were communicated via letter or memo. Books of correspondence between remarkable people have been published as insights into who they were and how they thought. Tools like email, chat and shared documents contain a wealth of personal subtleties, habits, quirks and patterns that might not surface so readily our publicly shared statuses. Future biographers will have an impressively overwhelming amount of resources to draw upon.
Photo by Jenny Downing
Posted on 26 February '11 by Matylda, under General. No Comments.
Tags:data visualization, New York CIty, real estate, rent, Trulia.
Trulia released this nifty interactive visualization addressing the question of whether it’s better to rent or to buy. The extreme size and redness of New York makes me chuckle. It’s a city filled with outliers, which is one of many quirks I love about it.
Posted on 17 February '11 by Matylda, under General. 1 Comment.
