I listened to a Jon Udell podcast with David Huynh regarding Huynh’s Freebase Parallax project a while back but it’s something you really have to see in action to appreciate. I just saw it in action and now I appreciate.
Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation. Parallax uses faceted navigation to make it easy to jump from one set of data to another related set of data and see the underlying connections.
David’s demo gets the idea across best:
I spent some time using Parallax to explore the influence node on Freebase, which attempts to capture the influences of notable people (and has led to some fun apps). Here are some of James Joyce’s biggest influences, mapped by place of birth:
Anyone who’s spent time puzzling over Finnegans Wake knows that Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher/historian/rhetorician/etymologist/jurist whom Joyce said made his imagination grow. But who influenced Vico? Here’s a timeline of those responsible:
There’s more to explore where that came from.
Julia Rothman regularly showcases fascinating book objects on Book By Its Cover but the sketchbook category is especially special. Look at what she’s talked people into sharing:
Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry:
Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Each of these games uses language not as an abstraction, the purely rational product of the mind, but as quite literally a material object to be manipulated and moved, cut-up and combined.
The Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, or the Five-fold Thought-ring of the German Language, is a database of the German language composed of five predicate variables: prefixes (forty-eight values), initial letters or diphthongs (fifty values), medial letters (twelve values), final letters of diphthongs (120 values) and suffixes (twenty-four values). Instead of using a table structure, however, each variable is inscribed along the edge of a disc and nested with each of the other discs, forming a simple combinatory mechanism that can generate any information stored in the database.
This “alphabet of human thoughts” remained an undercurrent in Leibniz’s philosophy throughout his life, manifesting itself in a number of different plans: his dream for a networked encyclopedia in which, through linking, every entry was a microcosm of the human macrocosm (see Selcer 29); his lingua characteristica, or notation system for concepts “whose signs or characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers” (Leibniz 222); even his notion of “monads—discrete, irreducible primitives that nonetheless reflect the infinity of the spiritual cosmos. More specifically, Leibniz develops his “alphabet” through account of a mathesis universalis, a universal system for storing and generating knowledge.
“The verbal and visual tropes that surround the alphabet cloak the fact that the unit of textual meaning—the letter—lacks meaning itself.”
Finding Yourself Through Your Favorites
0 Comments Published April 3rd, 2009, 1:21am in Effects, Etsy.Japanese Tumblr users are “addicted to reblogging,” ffffolks on FFFFOUND are defining themselves by the images they find, and Etsians are hearting more items than ever. I’m discovering more about myself as I build up my Etsy Favorites, namely that I’m fond of hand-drawn pattern and complexity:
Here’s an XL view courtesy of the Etsy API.
We just need better ways of sharing, organizing, displaying and discovering these things (working on it!).
With President Obama firing off memos and executive orders on open government, FOIA obedience and Executive Branch ethics, now feels like a good time to make sure Datamob is up to date. Notable additions:
Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle word clouds we see all too often. They have a blessedly simple API as well.
ReadTheStimulus.org has made the full text of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (House Stimulus Bill) searchable with comments for each page enabled. Actual dollar appropriations from the bill have been parsed out by volunteers and entered into a Google spreadsheet. Their tagline says it all: “$850 Billion, 941 pages, and counting… somebody needs to read it!”
The Legislative Lookup API from Mobile Commons is a database that matches latitude and longtitude with the U.S. congressional and state legislators for that location. Could be put to good use in your pet mapping application. They even made it available as a standalone Rails app.
Represent from The New York Times is the kind of application you could use the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API for. It’s a nice way for New Yorkers to find their elected representatives and see what they’re up to.
The New York Times Congress API is what actually powers Represent (Represent!). The great thing about it is that it was built to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can use it with the seven-character code used to identify members of Congress in the official Biographical Directory, or the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack to individual member responses.
DC Bikes is another example of a good local application, mapping bike routes, bike thefts and bike-related Craiglist postings for Washington, D.C. bikers. It uses the same Mapnik toolkit EveryBlock uses to get their nice maps. Built by Development Seed for the D.C. Data Catalog’s Apps for Democracy competition.
iLive.at also came out of Apps for Democracy. Enter a Washington, D.C. address and receive information tailored to that location and organized into categories like Errands, Emergencies, Recently Reported Crimes, People, Transportation and “Did You Know?” I would love to see a New York version.
You can keep up with all the action in this space on the Open Government, PoliParse and Sunlight Labs Google Groups.
Data Hunt: Entrepreneurship Around the Planet
0 Comments Published December 14th, 2008, 7:54pm in Business, Data, Etsy.
Good data on micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship around the world is hard to come by. There’s the World Bank’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Database, but it has more caveats than a prescription drug commercial. Different governments operating in different economies at different stages of development have different definitions for these things. The 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey comes close, “striving to define a unit of measurement, source of information, and concept of entrepreneurship applicable and available among the diverse countries surveyed.” This limits it to the “formal sector”—small companies registered with their governments—as opposed to the informal sector, like most sellers on Etsy. Still, it’s of some interest. Above, a screenshot of the Many Eyes bubble chart version of some of the data, with nations sized according to “new business density,” or the density of new registered companies per 1,000 citizens. New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, the UK and the Netherlands round out the top five. See the same data on a map here.
See also: Etsy and the World Economic Forum.
With the economy getting scarier and people getting trampled or worse on Black Friday, there’s a lot of disillusionment floating around and a lot of talk of bypassing traditional shopping this holiday season. I’ll be joining the growing chorus of people like Smiling Mama who are skipping the big retail stores and doing all their gift-getting on Etsy (and at places like Craftland)—not because I work for Etsy and not just because of the brilliant, one-of-a-kind items you can find on there, but because I can’t help but feel that the way out of this larger economic dead-end lies less in government bailouts than in supporting small business and the people around you and around the world making things, and I get a lot out of the purchases I make on Etsy. It’s the most meaningful shopping experience I know of. If you want your gifts to be unique and have meaning, Etsy’s an ideal place to start.
But where to start on Etsy? The Gift Guides can be a good entryway. Here’s an Etsy Mini (widget) of the Gift Guide for Her:
When you’re done there, you might be ready to pledge to buy handmade this year.
BibliOdyssey’s board-game roundup had me at “Filosofia cortesana de Alonso de Barros.” More can be found via a search for “game-board” on the British Museum’s Prints Database.
Last weekend in Providence I ended up checking out bits and pieces of Interrupt 2008, a festival co-hosted by Brown and RISD on “language-driven digital art,” and seeing a lot of old familiar faces. I actually find it comforting that the genre hasn’t changed much in the last ten years, and the low-tech aesthetic embraced by self-conscious net artists in the ’90s seems even more fitting today.
Christiane Paul, who introduced me to this scene back then, introduced concrete poet Marko Niemi at one event. His work reminds me of this quote from Kenneth Goldsmith about the web being the perfect medium for concrete poetry. He even runs a sort of Finnish Ubuweb called Nokturno.
See also hybrid letters.
Seoul-based Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries were the stars of the festival however. If you’re not familar with their animated Monaco-font text narratives set to jazz, I recommend Cunnilingus in North Korea (which Harper’s once tried to republish) and Beckett’s Bounce. They take a Warhol-like stance on the endeavor, saying they have no thoughts whatsoever on net art and no idea why they do what they do. Regardless, they’re huge now, exhibiting in museums around the world and enjoying a high-roller art-star lifestyle.
Both Niemi and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries started out as translators. They produce work in a number of languages with Young-hae Chang focused on English as a global dialect that is “up for grabs these days.” In an interview posted the other day on Nettime, they call English “a powerful political and cultural tool for people around the world.” In another interview: “Distance, homelessness, anonymity and insignificance are all part of the internet literary voice, and we welcome them.”
For all the dorks like myself who obsess about notebooks, this post is for you.
Full disclosure: I tend to be partial to notebooks of the pocket-sized, reporter-style, durable, flexible, wirebound and blank variety, but I use and sample all kinds. To my mind there are two types of notebooks: portable and desktop. Portable notebooks should be easy to carry around and fit comfortably in your pocket. Which pocket you use, and therefore which notebook, can depend on the season. In the warm months I require a slim, flexible notebook for my back pocket. In the winter, a harder-backed notebook can go into my inside coat pocket. Many notebooks that are marketed as portable—hello, Moleskine—are actually desktop notebooks in my opinion because they don’t fit comfortably in your pocket. They have their place.
Let’s get this out of the way: Moleskines are vastly overrated. Sure, they look nice but how functional are they really? I like a strong notebook that I can bend back. Moleskines can be laid flat but won’t bend over backwards for you. They don’t fit comfortably in your pocket. And for those who have bought into the Moleskine brand mythology, note that Hemingway, Picasso and Matisse did not in fact use Moleskines. Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman and countless bloggers do, to some folks’ dismay. Black Cover is an entire blog dedicated to uncovering superior Moleskine alternatives.
Pluses: Pretty. Moderately hackable.
Minuses: Unoriginal. Low-quality paper that can’t handle fountain pens, so pen nerds shun them (pen reviews is another post).
Muji—short for Mujirushi Ryohin, or “brandless quality goods”—has been taking the American notebook-nerd market by storm. As they say on their website, “Muji, the brand, is rational, and free of agenda, doctrine and ‘isms.’ The Muji concept derives from us continuously asking, ‘What is best from an individual’s point of view?’” Designer types are entranced by Muji’s intense minimalism. Their chrononotebook makes people giddy.
Pluses: Free of artifice. Also cheap! Many of their notebooks are $1.
Minuses: Very few. Available in New York at the MoMA Store, Muji Soho and inside the New York Times Building.
Rhodia is an iconic French brand of notebook whose design has been unchanged since the 1930s.
Pluses: Striking. Orange. Endorsed by poet-blogger Ron Silliman.
Minuses: Too clunky for portable use.
The tagline on this Japanese brand of notebooks says it all: “MOST ADVANCED QUALITY GIVES BEST WRITING FEATURES & GIVES SATISFACTION TO YOU.” Apica notebooks have a devoted cult following.
Pluses: Ultra high-quality paper.
Minuses: Their portable model, the CD5, is a bit too small for serious note-taking.
Barcelona-based Miquelrius notebooks first came to my attention as the platform for Bill Westerman’s paper-based time management software, above.
Pluses: Like Moleskine but much more flexible, with higher quality paper.
Minuses: Pages won’t lay flat. Owners of the most annoying website in the world.
Pluses: See above.
Minuses: Hard to come by. I recommend subscribing to his shop’s feed if you want in on the next batch.
Ecoteca was a sturdy and stylish Portuguese brand of notebook that now appears to be defunct.
Pluses: Rounded corners.
Minuses: Impossible to find.
Field Notes made a splash last year on the back-to-paper and get-things-done (GTD) scene, when they started showing up on blogs like Lifehacker. Launched by Coudal Partners, some people find the brand a bit cloying.
Pluses: Pocket-friendly. Heavy paperstock. Futura typeface.
Minuses: Seemingly designed with Urban Outfitters in mind. Tries too hard. Staplebound.
My current favorite, Rite in the Rain notebooks are 1.) sturdy as hell and 2.) can be used in the shower, where many people get their best ideas. Seriously, recommended.
Pluses: Waterproof authenticity.
Minuses: None.
Ciak is an Italian brand of notebook determined to take on Moleskine.
Pluses: Closes with a sensible horizontal elastic band.
Minuses: Too thick for portable use (twice the thickness of a Moleskine). A bit overzealous in their marketing.
The brand of choice for Japanese productivity junkies, Kokuyo makes hyper-functional notebooks for engineers and surveyors.
Pluses: Pocket-size. High-quality paper. Durable green cover.
Minuses: Only available in Japan.
Hailed by some as the perfect notebook, the Stifflexible was the inspiration behind the Black Cover blog, for whom they were resurrected after being discontinued. Two built-in creases on the front and back covers allow this handsome Italian notebook to be flipped through and searched without opening it. According to legend, Giuliano Mazzuoli got the idea after finding a book from the 1700s in a Florentine library with a similar design.
Pluses: Stiff yet flexible. Pages open flat. Back flap can be used as a bookmark. Made entirely in Italy. Not a Moleskine.
Minuses: The newer versions don’t have the creamy paper or colored page edges of old.
Lauren got the search functionality for Datamob up and running, making the site about 1,000 times more useful. Adjustments are in progress but you can subscribe to feeds of search results.
Recent additions: NPR API, BBC Backstage, CrunchBase API, CrunchBase Map, TheMiddleClass.org, geophysically scaled economic data, Walk Score, Lee Byron’s San Franscisco Walkability Map, Toby Segaran’s Industry Browser and a number of resources.
A personal announcement: After more than four years immersed in all things web-, blog- and ecommerce-related at the 92nd Street Y (new look/season/brand launching Thursday)—a place I love and have had the privilege of contributing to while working alongside some truly amazing people—I’m moving on to another amazing place: Etsy. Specifically the product team. And the busiest and Best Summer Ever continues.
I’ve been separating out product-focused feeds from the tech business feeds in my feedreading. Great product feeds include Emily Chang’s eHub, Chris “factoryjoe” Messina’s Flickr feed of notable screenshots, Marshall Kirkpatrick’s custom meta-feed of app sources which includes the aforementioned feeds, Konigi, Dave Winer’s TechJunk and the venerable Signal vs. Noise.
But I think what I really wanted and just didn’t know it is Pattern Tap, which collects and categorizes screenshots of interesting interface elements and allows you to create sets of your favorites. It’s organized UI inspiration.
Back to Paper: Mind Maps and Sketch Notes
3 Comments Published July 16th, 2008, 12:40am in Curiosities, Ideas.Before breaking out the wireframe sketches and paper prototypes, some back-to-paper web types get the juices flowing with mind maps and sketch notes. Then they blog about it.
Mike Rohde is kind of the king of these. 37Signals recently posted his sketch notes from the Seed 3 conference and they’re a pleasure to read. He’s done the same for SXSW, VizThink workshops and other web watering holes. Collect them all.
Paul Downey was inspired by Rohde to sketch-note FOWD London 2008, above. View the full size on Flickr and the sketch notes are even better with notes.
Austin Kleon creates mind maps of the books he reads when he’s not blacking out words in newspapers (for a book). Above, his takeaway from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence.
As someone who keeps a filing cabinet full of old notebooks and sketchbooks organized by year and topic (if only I could tag them), I never tire of these web-head hand styles or their graffiti counterpart. But sometimes you need some mind-mapping software to get the job done. Lars Plougmann’s digitally rendered mind map above of Joshua Schachter’s 2006 Future of Web Apps talk contains a lot of relevant information. Check it out full size.
And if you don’t think any of this paper stuff is useful, consider Bill Westerman’s paper-based time management software. Or Adaptive Path’s sketchboard technique.
Back up and running after a sudden barrage of generous linking from Joshua Schachter, Andy Baio, Jack Dorsey, Valleywag, Boing Boing, Daring Fireball, Download Squad, CNET’s Webware, UTNE Reader, Bub.blicio.us and other good folks.
Servers don’t hold up as well as paper.
Many an urban internet meme collector can tell you about the 25-year-old Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles—embedded in hundreds of city streets throughout the Western Hemisphere, a cryptic message from an unknown crank: TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’s 2001: RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.
Researchers have traced it back to a handful of tantalizingly vague possible sources: a Philadelphia social worker, a 1983 David Mamet play, etc. There’s even a movie coming out about it, so the above photograph of a NEW Toynbee message which appeared in the middle of Ninth Avenue at 56th Street this morning in Hell’s Kitchen may well be part of a six-figure viral marketing campaign, but after reading about the filmmaker I tend to doubt it. It also doesn’t seem to be of the cheapo “new school” variety the Toynbee Tile scholars have mentioned. This one is very much in the original style, but with an entirely different message:
HOUSE OF HADES
SHOW NO MERCY TO
THE MEAN MACHINE
IN SOCIETY ‘2008…
Framed by the words “PROLETARIOT’S AFFLICTION” [sic].
A message from the Jupiter Liberation Front? The internet offers no leads at the moment, so here’s a first submission.
UPDATE: Justin Duerr of the Resurrect Dead film reports that these “House of Hades” tiles were first spotted up in Buffalo last fall. Here’s a recent sighting.
I mean BookMooch—have you tried it? It’s enough to send a book hoarder past the point of no return. You go and list the books you have that you no longer want and if they’re good ones, you’ll receive email alerts within minutes from people who have those same books on their wishlists and would love for you to send yours to them. Do that quickly and you’ll earn good feedback, which will build up points which allow you to acquire the books you want from other souls. No money is exchanged. It’s book wealth redistribution and it’s lovely.
There are other services like this, namely PaperBackSwap, but they feel more corporate. PaperBackSwap is gearing up to start charging, as they repeatedly tell you when you sign up, and rather than get out of the way of the book-love fest like BookMooch they seem bent on complicating things. First they pair you up with a veteran user who has volunteered to be your Tour Guide, which is a little awkward, then they introduce money into the equation—you can buy book-credits as well as “PBS Money,” which is used to pay for their branded delivery confirmation feature: a printable barcode scanned by the postal service for tracking purposes that ties into your PBS account and streamlines book-credit management. You can also buy printable postage with your PBS Money, or pay $8 for the privilege of exchanging boxes of books with someone (Box-o-Books™).
On the other hand, PaperBackSwap’s traffic is higher than that of BookMooch and they have more books available. They’re also out to become the Oprah of modern book exchange and could care less about the whiny book blogger demographic.
BookMooch is non-profit, has a bang-up API, hangs out with some great charities, plays well with LibraryThing and was created by John Buckman, Renaissance lutenist and founder of Magnatune among other good things. It’s also enabled some unexpected acquisitions like the early signed edition of a book by Thomas Flanagan (who shares my birthday and whose daughter’s work is a good conversation starter on the internet). In sum: BookMooch good.
If you ever wanted to know more about the people behind the book art you see around the web and on sites like this one, proceed to Elizabeth Wadell’s piece in the summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation. She profiles Robert The, well-named creator of the book gun above, Cara Barer and Jacqueline Rush Lee.
Robert The’s story is particularly interesting and began with a breakdown while in school double-majoring in philosophy and math:
I kinda blew a fuse in my senior year—something very strange happened—and I lost my ability to read for a period of a month or two. This sharpened my interest regarding what was actually going on with the symbols that convey meaning on a concrete level.
As Wadell writes, The’s works “seem to elongate that infinitesimal moment between focusing on the word and reading it.” He also eschews the art world to sell directly through retail stores and eBay.
Elsewhere in TQC, an excitable essay about Argentine genius Macedonio Fernandez, “the man who invented Borges,” whose books I’m about to track down after this introduction:
Both novels exemplify Macedonio’s implacable pursuit, similar to Borges’s, of literary forms that went beyond realism and plot, to investigate the bottomless combinatory delirium at the source of art and reality. His Adriana Buenos Aires was an experiment in parodying defunct novelistic forms handed down from gothic fiction and romanticism, while suggesting possibilities for literature light years beyond sentimentalism. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, first published in 1967 and impossible to summarize, is best described as an extended experiment in writing an open novel analogous to a piece of music. The prose evokes a dizzying world of aesthetic associations and possibilities in the reader’s mind. At every moment it tests the limits between art and life, reality and fiction, as well as form and content.
Macedonio’s novels do not satisfy on a narrative level as Borges’s stories do, but instead engross us with their constant tinkering under the hood of fiction. They suggest a workshop full of previously unimagined literary contraptions. Even if most of these do not quite make it out of the garage, they still make mind-opening exhibits for anyone with time to visit Macedonio’s museum: a kind of early 20th-century World’s Fair for possible literatures.
Will also have to add Fernandez to the Influence domain on Freebase, which is becoming a rich source of data for visualization enthusiasts.
I’ve recently discovered Etsy as a source for old books and bookish ephemera. A search for “altered books” in the vintage category is like entering an ecommerce-enabled version of BibliOdyssey (i.e., awesome). Some picks:
