Geographic news coverage visualized
Mar 09, 2012 12:52 am • Permalink Kitchen Budapest explores local news coverage in Hungary with sound and a bubbling map.
Ebullition visualises and sonificates data pulled from one of the biggest news sites of Hungary, origo.hu. In the 30 fps animation, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010.
Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. The sound follows the visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.
Next step: show the news causing those bubbles.
[Submap | Thanks, Attila]
The personal analytics of Stephen Wolfram
Mar 08, 2012 01:41 pm • Permalink 
Stephen Wolfram examines his archive of personal data from emails to keystrokes to phone calls, going all the way back to 1990. Above shows the hourly distribution of his activities.
The overall pattern is fairly clear. It's meetings and collaborative work during the day, a dinner-time break, more meetings and collaborative work, and then in the later evening more work on my own. I have to say that looking at all this data I am struck by how shockingly regular many aspects of it are. But in general I am happy to see it. For my consistent experience has been that the more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.
Woflram concludes:
As personal analytics develops, it's going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives. At first it all may seem quite nerdy (and certainly as I glance back at this blog post there's a risk of that). But it won't be long before it's clear how incredibly useful it all is—and everyone will be doing it, and wondering how they could have ever gotten by before. And wishing they had started sooner, and hadn't "lost" their earlier years.
Then again, even if you don't actively collect data about yourself, there's still plenty to go off of: email, mobile phone logs, text messages, calendars, etc. So I think it's more about doing things with our existing (and growing) time capsules than it is about making sure we don't lose things. It'll be interesting to see what roles companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook in providing views into our past.
[Stephen Woflram]
Your personal networks visualized as microbiological cells in Biologic
Mar 08, 2012 09:48 am • Permalink 
Data exists in digital form, on our computers and spreadsheets, but the exciting part about data is what it represents in the real world. Bits are people, places, and things. This is especially true with social data from places like Twitter and Facebook, where ideas flow and people talk to interact with each other in different ways. It's not just retweets and likes. Bloom Studio, the folks who brought you Planetary, embrace this idea in their just released iPad app, Biologic.
The basic concept: choose a social network from the Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn blobs on the opening screen. You will have to authenticate each one you try (only the first time) and then you will transition into a view of the people you follow represented as microbiological cells.
Glowing shapes inside the cells are activities (tweets, pictures, etc). The bigger the activity, the newer it is. The more the activity is moving, the more retweets/favorites/likes it has. Once you have read an item it gets darker so you can tell what's new.
It looks like another great blend of data, generative art, and game dynamics. I don't have an iPad though, so I'll live vicariously through your comments. Grab Biologic (for free) on iTunes.
[Bloom Studios | Thanks, Tom]
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