I am not sure if I should announce this myself, but as of Monday, January 28th, around noon, I passed my Dissertation Proposal Defense. The title of my dissertation proposal is “Machine-level Policy Implementation by Data Managers and Data Scientists, and the Impact on Digital Stewardship: a Mixed-Methods Content Analysis.”
Yes, I have a new title now. I am a “Doctoral Candidate”!
A-B-D!
I should have about a year left, now. My program “front-loads” the work.
Have you ever wondered why data visualization matters? Do you prefer to look simply at numbers in a spreadsheet, or would you rather seen an image of that data?
Many people learn better visually. We all have to crawl through a great deal of data each and every day as well as process the meaning of all of this information. So, why bother with data visualization at all?
To understand that, it helps to understand the principles we strive for in data journalism. At The New York Times, we strongly believe that visualization is reporting, with many of the same elements that would make a traditional story effective: a narrative that pares away extraneous information to find a story in the data; context to help the reader understand the basics of the subject; interviewing the data to find its flaws and be sure of our conclusions. Prettiness is a bonus; if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding some wild new visualization style or strange interface. (From: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/word-clouds-considered-harmful/.)
Column Five on Vimeo also provides a brief overview on The Value of Data Visualization below.
What do you think are the key concepts for a clear visualization of data? What do you consider a bad info graphic? Do you have a favorite infographic? (This could be a favorite because it is excellent, or a favorite because it is so awesomely bad.)
[Via Junar.]
Welcome to my own version of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard-ism).
Yes, I know the US federal budget needs to be cut, but not my programs.
Seriously. :)
The Sunlight Foundation writes:
Some of the most important technology programs that keep Washington accountable are in danger of being eliminated. Data.gov, USASpending.gov, the IT Dashboard and other federal data transparency and government accountability programs are facing a massive budget cut, despite only being a tiny fraction of the national budget. Help save the data and make sure that Congress doesn’t leave the American people in the dark.
The video below provides a brief overview of some of the benefits the open data movement has provided.
If this issue is of concern to you, please sign a petition, write your Congressional Representative or Senator, write a letter to the editor, of just spread the word online via resources such as Twitter or Facebook.
[Via Citasa.org.]
What if you have access to all kinds of personal data, yet you just can’t bring yourself to Be Evil with it?
Happy Monday!
I hope you have a great week.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Are you honest about your relationships status on social networking sites? Do you display the name of your significant other on your site? How have you spent this past Valentine’s weekend? How will you spend today? Did you buy or do you plan to buy a gift for your significant other?
These questions and more are answered in the infographic below. The data was culled from 400 users of MySpace and Facebook.
The infographic above, “Social Networking Americans’ Valentine’s Day Plans” was created by Lab42 for Mashable.
Is there any Valentine’s Day data from social networking sites you’d like to see that is missing above? Does any of the data surprise you?
This post is for those of you who are interested in Linked Open Data.
The following is from an announcement sent out via email by Diane Goldenberg-Hart of CNI on 7 February 2011.
A new video from CNI’s 2010 fall membership meeting is now available from CNI’s video channels on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo) and Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/channels/cni). Linked Open Data: The Promises and the Pitfalls… Where Are We and Why Isn’t There Broader Adoption? features case studies by speakers from Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Internet Archive, as well as a summary presentation by MIT’s MacKenzie Smith.
Presentation slides and handouts from this session are accessible from the project briefing page at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2010b.fall/Abstracts/PB-linked-negulescu.html.
Why do you think Linked Open Data hasn’t been more broadly adopted? What do you think are the promises and pitfalls?
How do you manage all of the distractions from the data and information thrown at you from social media, email, the Web, chat and [insert name of app here]? Well? Not-so-well? Do you focus on one task at a time, or do you multi-task?
David McCandless of Information is Beautiful created this Hierarchy of Digital Distractions in August 2009.
Does any of it still look familiar?
To view a larger image of the infographic, please click on it and click on it again on the new page.
All I can say is, “ouch!”
I’ve only had a smart phone for 10 months, and yet I cannot imagine how I lived without it. Therefore, for your viewing pleasure, I have posted this animation from themobilefuture on the mobile phone in the year 2010. The animation is by http://www.istrategylabs.com.
The authors cite the following statistics (sources not listed):
Massive increase in apps downloaded:
- FIVE BILLION apps downloaded – up from 300 million in 2009Whopping expansion of location-based services
- FIVE MILLION Foursquare users — up from 200,000 users in 2009Surge in mobile social media platforms
- 347 PERCENT growth in Twitter mobile usage
- 200 MILLION mobile Facebook Users
- 100 MILLION YouTube videos played on mobile devices everyday
Can you imagine life without your mobile phone?
A long, long time ago (100 BCE) in a civilization far, far away (Ancient Greece), someone built a mechanism that could “predict celestial events and eclipses with unprecedented accuracy” (Engadget). The machine — or, at least one of them — was lost in a shipwreck and lay on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea until divers discovered the object off of the island of Antikythera in 1901. It wasn’t until 2006 that researchers using x-ray analysis learned the purpose of the device.
Researchers working on The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project write:
For decades, scientific investigation failed to yield much light and relied more on imagination than the facts. However research over the last half century has begun to reveal its secrets. The machine dates from around the end of the 2nd century B.C. and is the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world. Nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. The Antikythera Mechanism is now understood to be dedicated to astronomical phenomena and operates as a complex mechanical “computer” which tracks the cycles of the Solar System.
In 2010, an Apple Engineer by the name of Andrew Carol built a fully functional replica of the machine using…Legos.
Read more…