Google continues to make AIM and Yahoo! irrelevant:
tweeted apps and sites
I am really enjoying the sharing of applications and sites on Twitter. A few have come across lately that I thought I would share here.
A few weeks ago Matt tweeted about Picnik, a free, robust online photo editing application that integrates with photos on Facebook, Flickr, myspace, photobucket, and many other applications. I showed it to my Writing, Research, and Technology students last night because many were having problems gaining access to Photoshop from home for basic photo editing work (creating banners, adding text to images, and so forth). They loved it.
Today Hannah (who blogs at Hannah’s Notes on New Media) pointed to Tweetdeck, which is in public beta. Tweetdeck “aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.” Organization is achieved by creating user-defined searchable groups.
The mining of tweets is already happening with some spectacular results. For example, Perspctv‘s 2008 presidential election coverage mashed together data mined from tweets, blogs posts, news feeds, CNN’s national poll of polls, and other sources to create dynamic visual representations of election-related data in one easily navigated dashboard:
Perspctv has just released a search function that allows users to create their own dashboards based on individually-defined search times. It mines blog posts, tweets, Google search volume, and news mentions. For example, here is the visual representation for the search terms, Obama, media, and race:
I can see wonderful applications of these applications in Information Architecture and related courses.
And, for all us amature photographers out there who dream of one day making it, Melissa pointed to The Digital Journalist. It looks to be an outstanding resource.
Posted in academia, IT, pedagogy, photography, teaching
Tagged data mining, hannah biemold, information architecture, journalism, matt gold, melissa sexton, perspctv, photo editing, photography, photoshop, tweet, twitter, viz rhet
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when genes look like texts and texts look like something else
An article in the November 10, 2008, edition of The New York Times by Carl Zimmer, “Now: The Rest of the Genome,” discusses the thoroughly fascinating (and exceedingly difficult) of mapping the human genome. The article includes this gorgeous graphic, “Mapping the Epigenome” (click image to enlarge):
Upon first viewing the image I was struck by how closely it resembled W. Wilford Bradley’s TextArc (which I have discussed before) representations of texts (click image to enlarge):
Visual representations of data, texts, and, as we see here, human biology, show us just how inconsistent linearity is with how texts work and humans think. That is, linearity is not reality.
I am startng to try to find new assignments and conceive of new graduate courses that will asks students to compose in non-linear forms, to create multimodal compositions that build upon and then move away from (read: destroy) traditional metaphors of writing, which, despite having revision built in to them, are too constrained by their text-based geneologies. Any ideas you have are greatly appreciated.
Update 11/11/08 9:24am: Melissa responded to this post on my Facebook feed, but I want to add her suggestion here because it is spot-on: “You could probably glean a few ideas from http://www.vectorsjournal.org/ or from Mark Bernstein w/ Eastgate.” Gave Vectors a quick look over breakfast. I’m going to have to spend much more time there. Thanks, Melissa!
thoughts on a sunday morning
I have recently gotten into a Sunday morning habit of reading PostSecret and then the New York Times on my cell phone in bed while listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. Its a nice way to ease into a Sunday that is usually a mix of work and errands and football. Gets the mind working but in a very relaxing setting. Here’s what I’ve been thinking today thus far.
1) Post Secret is an incredible site for a number of reasons. I like it most for personal reasons. So many of the secrets are about relationships, such as from today:
Posted in academia
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