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War Data: Visualization of Afghanistan Hotspots Using Wikileaks Data

26 October 2010
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How would you take a data set released by Wikileaks and visualize it to see activity in Afghanistan over time? As part of this week’s theme of war data, I present a visualization based on leaked war data.
Mike Dewar, Drew Conway, John Myles White, and Harlan Harris used R code (the scripts, etc., are available [...]

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Google Releases World Map of Government Censorship Requests

28 September 2010
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How would you display a somewhat abstract term like “censorship” to your users and the rest of the world?
Earlier this week, Google released the latest version of their censorship map. Via the BBC: “the new map and tools follows on from that and allows users to click an individual country to see how many [...]

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The Humanities Take on Data Mining via Google Books

22 June 2010
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The Humanities are “Going Google”, according to Marc Parry of The Chronicle, in a piece he wrote a few weeks ago.
The gist of the article is that some Humanities scholars are very interested in data mining the texts scanned in for the Google Books Project.
Why do they want to use Big Data mining techniques [...]

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A Short History of Scientific Information Services

15 April 2010
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In the following videos, the producer traces the history of scientific communication from verbal/in-person, to letters, and then to printed journals. The producer describes the work of ISI and the company’s founder, Eugene Garfield. Journals grew from a handful to thousands. This led to classification and indexing in order to find relevant journal articles via [...]

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Google Books Settlement Paths Forward Diagram Released

4 March 2010
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Jonathan Band has developed a diagram charting the possible outcomes of the Google Books settlement. Designed by Tricia Donovan, the diagram is called, “GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement”, and has been released by the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Association of [...]

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Gaiman’s “MirrorMask” Library Cleverness

20 February 2010
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This past week I watched Neil Gaiman’s “Mirror Mask“. The book-as-film chronicles the dream of a teenager whose mother has become ill and is undergoing surgery. In the scene below, the teenager, Helena, goes to the library with her New Best Friend, Valentine, to find clues to a missing charm. They arrive via flying books [...]

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The Public Domain Manifesto

5 February 2010
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“The Public Domain Manifesto” has been released by COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the digital public domain. If you would like to show your support for this cause, after you have read “The Public Domain Manifesto”, you may sign it. You may choose whether or not you would like your signature displayed online. Below, [...]

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What is Your Digital Fingerprint?

4 February 2010
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As a result of Data Privacy Day last week, I have spent the past few days poking around online to see what data about myself I could discover that I didn’t know existed. Before I try to tame others’ data, perhaps I should try taming my own?
I searched under various versions of my name. Now, [...]

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Beginning a Series — Reviews of Open Data Sites

29 January 2010
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I will be reviewing English-language, government-sponsored open data sites as an off-shoot of my doctoral work. I will begin initially with the “key” government sites compiled by the authors of The Guardian’s DataBlog as one of their inaugural posts.
Last week I reviewed data.gov.uk, so I while I may add a bit more detail to [...]

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HM Government Opens Up Government Data to the Public

21 January 2010
Data.uk.gov web site listing of all data sets

The British Government has released data sets to the public for use in either the public or private sectors at data.gov.uk.
Previously, the governments of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand had created data sites for use by the public, including commercial use. The primary idea behind the release of these data sets is [...]

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