michael fives tumblog

speakin my language.

The main ideas I was interested in visualizing were what happened, when, and who was present.  The whenquestion is particularly interesting due to Wallace’s use of Subsidised Time.  It became clear as I was preparing the data that much of the book is set during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, but I pressed on with the visualization anyway.

So cool.

Baroque.me (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture. baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites. Using the math behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.

Shan Carter on Data Storytelling

Shan Carter, who makes interactive graphics for The New York Times, talks telling stories with data in his aptly named presentation, “How I tried for years to find the perfect form for interactive graphics, how I failed, and why, whether a perfect form exists or not, I’ve stopped my desperate pursuit.”

He starts with finding a balance between statistical analysis and story, and then finishes with the kicker that visualization is a form of communication just like a movie or a book. And that carries with it its own implications.

The short Q&A at the end is pretty good, too. Just ignore the first obligatory question on how you make graphics that get more traffic.

At One Police Plaza, we protesters had been the only occupants of our cell. We’d had a great time. We sang songs; one particularly energetic protester, Austin, led us in a stunning rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” We did joke versions of our chants. “This is what a condiment looks like!” we’d chanted, when someone got mustard to put on a cheese sandwich. And when an officer delivered us some toilet paper (this was a cleaner cell), Austin tried to start the “This is what anal hygiene looks like!” chant, though that one failed. When arrested female protesters were led by our large holding cell, we hooted and cheered and banged on the plastic wall, to let them know we supported them.

Now we were in a very different environment. There was probably room enough for us on the benches but we didn’t feel confident enough to claim any of it. We sat down on the floor, quietly. On our way in, we’d been given the standard-issue sandwiches, plus a milk, and now an extremely tall man—he must have been around seven feet—came over and asked Stephen for his milk. Stephen was not attached to his milk, and quickly gave it up; the man took it and sat back down. It wasn’t clear if this was a power play on his part, to show who was boss, or whether he just really liked milk, which is why he had grown so tall. We continued to talk quietly among ourselves about the protest.

—News Desk: Central Booking : The New Yorker by Keith Gessen

There’s no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I’m the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there’s a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!

—The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

” “Systeme D” … essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. … Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) … concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes. … A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank … suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated — in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D — fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations.”

More and more, we define ourselves— or pride ourselves, or at least “express” ourselves— via our skills in picking interesting things out of that cloud of options. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that somewhere in this process, “indie” completed its trip from being the province of freaks and geeks to something with cachet— something that appeals to people’s sense of themselves as discerning.