Is HTML XML? This question came up in a conversation with Sarah and @k8lin, and ended up being harder than I thought it’d be. There seems to be a fair amount of confusion on the topic, especially given the W3C’s recent abandonment of XHTML 2.0 and growing use of HTML5.
So, I decided to lay it [...]
Markup languages: who’s who?
April 1, 2010 – 10:21 pm
Portrait of the artist as a phrenology illustration
January 22, 2010 – 5:25 pm
The first assignment in my infoVis class was to make a visual introduction to ourselves. I drew a self-portrait in profile, then added my categorized interests in the style of a 19th-century phrenology illustration (compare with actual period illustrations here and here).
Phrenology is interesting stuff. Though phrenologists had nearly everything wrong, modern neuroimaging has demonstrated [...]
$35 homemade whiteboard coffee table
December 22, 2009 – 8:10 pm
Whiteboards are great infovis tools, but expensive and need space. Solution: the whiteboard coffee table. It’s the very poor man’s Microsoft Surface (with no BSOD!). Also, if your taste in home decor tends toward the spartan (as does mine), this makes a great dinner table; it’s durable and really easy to clean. Most importantly, it’s [...]
Prezi: presentation junk 2.0
April 30, 2009 – 2:50 pm
It’s 2009. I think everyone out there knows that Powerpoint is, at best, overused (at worst:Stalin). Particularly gruesome is the animated slide-transition “feature,” which I think most agree has the same communication effectiveness and subtle charm as “<blink>” tags, mouse-cursor trails, and hilarious animated gifs of cats.
So how is it that presentation tool Prezi is [...]
FeedVis 2.0: custom visualization for your feeds
December 3, 2008 – 4:27 pm
My FeedVis project–the interactive tagcloud for a group of feeds–has been out for a week now, I’ve been thrilled at the positive response I’ve gotten so far. One rather glaring problem with the program, though, was that you could only look at the top 50 edublogs.
Not anymore. After a few late nights, I’ve got a [...]
FeedVis: a deeper tagcloud for edublogs
November 25, 2008 – 3:53 am
Tagclouds have value, but, as I’ve written before, they’ve a number of shortfalls as well. I’ve just finished my attempt to remedy some of these problems: FeedVis. It’s an animated tagcloud that lets you compare word frequencies accross different time periods and authors, then check out the posts that used the words. The demo is [...]
PrezDebatr 2.0! Beta!
October 13, 2008 – 1:11 pm
Google is transforming the way we watch a political debate. This Google Blog post demonstrates how viewers of the VP debate earlier this month made Google searches like “clean coal” and “define:maverick” spike as candidates spoke. Without question, these viewers are experiencing something much richer than what would have been possible fifteen years ago.
But why [...]
Grad school: because your uncle at Lehman Bros. is not such a great connection now.
October 7, 2008 – 12:50 pm
A nice bit of infoVis from the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper. Kind of not the best news for someone who’s applying to doctoral programs this fall…um, can my app go in a special pile for people who’ve been planning this for years, regardless of what the economy would’ve done?
The trouble with tagclouds
September 15, 2008 – 10:33 pm
Tag clouds, those darlings of early web 2.0, have been seeing something of a backlash lately. Zeldman was suggesting that tag clouds were the new mullets back in 2005; more lately, ReadWriteWeb wondered if tagclouds were dead altogether. The main complaint in both cases wasn’t that tag clouds were just no good, but that they’d [...]
Mmmm…data visualization bliss.
June 22, 2008 – 11:58 pm
Has Scott Leslie has written the perfect blog post? It’s a triple threat: a relevant, interesting topic (personal learning environments), a cool approach (visualizations), and—most importantly, for me—a comprehensive list of similar efforts by other bloggers.
In a data-sodden world, the scarce resource is not access, but organization. Scott adds organizational value both through visualization of [...]