Seeing Data

A few weeks back I animated 24 hours of Twitter data, mapping every tweet with geographic coordinates. I found it interesting to observe not only where geo-tweets occurred but also where they were absent. The video below tentatively explores the relationship between population density and where people are tweeting. This animation begins with a view focused on Wellington, New … Read More

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a … Read More

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This video by Carlos Bueno below depicts in slow-motion what happens when one computer requests an image from another computer over the Internet. I think it’s really neat. Imagine that the big grey circle on the left is your computer and the circle on the right is some website that you visited. Each flying circle represents a unit of … Read More

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This evening’s post is a guest contribution from my wife, Sienna Latham. She writes below about the role of data visualisation in her historical research. — I recently submitted my master’s thesis on English women’s chymical activities during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), exploring the intersecting histories of science, medicine, magic, women and religion. ‘Chymistry’ is a composite term … Read More

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This classic short documentary from 1977 helps viewers conceptualise the relative sizes of things in the Universe. Powers of Ten begins with a one meter wide scene viewed from a distance of one meter. Every ten seconds the camera zooms in or out by a factor of ten. It seamlessly transitions from galactic vistas to scenes rendered at sub-atomic … Read More

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This morning I was writing code in a programming language called Python. I hit a sticky problem and turned to an arcane feature of the language known as the “The Zen of Python” for guidance. There I read the words, “In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess,” and I was enlightened. Open data has been … Read More

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My jaw dropped when I saw this video of researchers at Tokyo University creating holographic images that “feel” like physical objects. The technology uses ultrasonic waves to create a sensation of pressure on the hands of people interacting with the hologram. When inaudible sound waves emitted by a set of ultrasonic transducers interfere, they can create a focal point … Read More

If you are at all interested in data visualisation, please find 50 minutes to watch this excellent feature by Geoff McGhee. Journalism in the Age of Data explores how programmers, designers and journalists are creating visualisations to understand datasets, tell stories and encourage curiosity. There are great interviews and intriguing examples throughout. Highly recommended. [vimeo width=”651″ height=”366″]http://vimeo.com/14777910[/vimeo] … Read More

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This afternoon Trade Me announced the release of their developer application programming interface (API). This is really cool news … but why? An API is a set of programming instructions and standards that enable different software applications to interact. Hmmm …. that’s the sort of description that probably only makes sense to people who already … Read More

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A major storm is coming. At the moment the Manawatu is sunny and eerily calm. Soon the rain will be here. Then the rivers will start to rise and the fields near work will disappear under water. The prospect of the storm makes me wish for two things. The first is that I could play with/hack the cool “rain table” … Read More