Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

Soon after my engineering students sat down in front of the computers in the computer classroom that we are “squatting in” (so sayeth the Assistant Dean) in Education Hall, one of them brought up the Kindle, and pointed to this image:

He was just enthralled with how well the pencil shows the Kindle’s size and shape. I agreed that it was an excellent example of scaling and mapping. I think Tufte would agree, too.

Frank Taylor over at Google Earth Blog points to a new animation by The National Snow and Ice Data Center that maps the melting of the Arctic ice cap between September, 1979, and September, 2007. Screen shots I took of the animation in Google Earth of September, 1979, and September, 2007 (click on the images for full resolution):

September, 1979	September, 2007

The animation shows that since 1979 there has never been a time when there has been less ice in the Arctic cap.

I am loving TextArc, though I am somewhat amazed that I have never heard of or seen it, especially since it has been around since the mid-late 1990s. The creator, Paley, tapped into Project Gutenberg to be able to TextArc thousands of works. The TextArc of The Waste Land brings a whole new dimension to the spatiality of the poem:

In the few (wonderful) chances I have had to discuss The Waste Land with students, I have brought them into it by conceiving of the poem as a series of spaces–lands that the protagonist was traversing in search of multiple meanings. The TextArc shows that landscape in a new way–as Paley puts it (.pdf; this link describes the process of designing a TextArc): they can “serve as a visual seed, evoking new insights into a text’s meaning.”

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I just came across the companion site for the book Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. This book looks fascinating, and I’m going to be ordering it from the University of Minnesota Press. The book “charts the ascendancy of mapping as a powerful interdisciplinary strategy that links people and places, data and organizations, and physical and virtual environments.”

The web site has the most incredible map: “W.Bradford Paley’s TextArc version of the book [which] shows each page as thumbnail and highlights the most-used terms”:

TextArc “is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by everaging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing. It compliments approaches such as Statistical Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics by providing an verview, letting intuition help extract meaning from an unread text” (from their pdf overview). It the pet project of one person, W. Bradford Paley, a self-described “interaction designer,” and many others who have provided support. Here is a TextArc of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (click on the image to go to the interactive version; go here first to verify that your browser is supported):

I am blown away by this. It’s too late to write anything about it now, but I will when I have a few minutes to really figure out what I am seeing, what I think about it, and how it could be used in the classroom.

I recently came across several interactive maps on the interactive graphics section of the Philadelphia Inquirer website while looking up some information on the number of Philly homicides in 2007 (as of October 10, 318). Three that caught my attention are: “Philadelphia Shootings in 2007,” “Philadelphia Homicides in 2007,” and “Philadelphia Median Home Prices.” The maps, designed by Alan Baseden, John Duchneskie, and Robert West, are wonderful examples of what Edward Tufte calls beautiful evidence (click image to see full-size)

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I have reached the pinnacle of my career: I’ve been cited in a talk about the origins of the universe. What could be more important?

An old friend who I met in Paris back in 1994 while on my Watson Fellowship, Hugh Hill, is an associate professor of Space Science at the International Space University. Yesterday I got an email from him: “I thought that you might be amused (bemused ?) to see Slide # 9 of the attached lecture, which I delivered to our M.Sc. students in September. As a die-hard academic, you are duly acknowledged.” Slide 9 of the talk “Origin of the Solar System” is entitled “Bring Back Pluto? (The Silly Season)” and looks like this:

Here’s the portion of the slide that brings me into space immortality:

Hah!

As an aside, here is a mapping of International Space University alumni–an incredible achievement considering that it was founded in 1987:

Last weekend, after reflecting on the fact that I talk about it all the time with students regardless of what class I am teaching, I decided to take the plunge and get a Facebook account. According to the fascinating Wired article, “How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web’s Hottest Platform,” I was 1 of 1 million new users in the last week, and among the fastest growing user population:

As for those concerns that Facebook’s membership had peaked? Well, now
it’s signing up nearly 1 million new users a week. By the end of August
there were 36 million of them. And these aren’t just the tweens or
college kids you might suspect; the fastest-growing segment of Facebook
users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all site users.
Total registrations have more than quadrupled over the previous year.
The number of employees has tripled, as has revenue. And venture
capitalists say that if Facebook were to go public today, investors
would value it at more than $5 billion — five times what Yahoo had been
prepared to pay.

To say that I have found Facebook intoxicating would be an understatement. I am addicted.

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As I have written about in prior posts, my students are writing in collaborative blogs and have also created individual netvibes accounts. I, too, have a netvibes account, and have been using it as a RSS feed host for my students blogs.

I’m exhausted, so not a lot about this, but to say that I really like seeing all their posts in one place. Other times when I have asked students to create blogs or have their own forums, I would have to go to each individual site. Though we would talk in class about creating interconnectivity among the blogs or forums, having to go to go each site to see what was there often worked against that idea. Now, however, because I can see all of their ideas converging into one writing space, I can begin to more readily see connections among their ideas, places where discussions of the texts overlap and contradict one another, how the discussions of their professional, personal, and educational interests merge. This new space allows for the perception that there is a more seamless ecology of ideas flowing through the blogs, mapping their ideas as they emerge over time.

Two CFPs have been announced that ask participants to consider “space” or “place”:

7th Annual Louisiana Conference on Language and Literature: On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture

and

Special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly: New Technological Spaces: Mastering the Literacies of Thinking and Doing across Multiple Modalities.

Descriptions below.

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The August 17, 2007, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story by Scott Carlson called “An Anthropologist in the Library” which details a study conducted by Nancy Fried Foster at the University of Rochester. Foster specializes in work-practice theory and the anthropology of work. The study was designed to learn more about how students spent their time on campus: where they write papers and do homework, what tools they use to help them complete tasks, what else they are doing while doing their work, and so forth. Study results have “helped guide a library renovation, influenced a Web-site redesign, led to changes in the way the library markets itself to students, and, in some cases, completely changed the image of undergraduates in the eyes of Rochester librarians.”

One important portion of the study asked students to map their routes on campus on a typical campus, noting the order of the routes, the time they arrived at a particular location, and the time they left:

They also asked students to collaborate on the design of new library spaces:

This study is an exemplar of what can be achieved in learning space designs when students are (administrators allow them to be) the driving force of change.

On a related note . . . a recent post by Jim Brown on the CWRL’s Blogging Pedagogy, describes an assignment-in-the-works where students will map the borders in their lives using Flickr and Google MyMaps. Jim provides a link to his own mapped borders. My Maps Plus now offers the ability to embed Google MyMaps into any web page.