heerforceone http://jheer.org/blog/ it's a bloggy blogg world en-us 2007-01-23T12:09:49-08:00 ibm launches many eyes http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000392.html Many-Eyes is a site for massively collaborative visual data analysis, allowing users to upload data sets, visualize them, and discuss them online. In this sense, it is similar to other projects like Swivel and Data360, but supports a much broader range of data types and engaging visualizations. And it's a lot of fun to play with!

I had the privilege of working this past summer at IBM Research Cambridge in the Visual Communication group with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas. Having watched them and the rest of the team prepare this project, it's exhilarating to see it launched! We also spent time researching and testing additional features to support social data analysis. Look for our upcoming CHI2007 paper (link soon) for more!

]]> geekitude jheer 2007-01-23T12:09:49-08:00 science visualization challenge http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000389.html Here are the winners of the 2006 Science Visualization challenge. There is some really beautiful work here. There's also a slide show.

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]]> geekitude jheer 2006-09-29T15:16:15-08:00 mini-interview http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000385.html A short interview about my experiences and thoughts on information visualization was recently posted on the blog mentegrafica. The text of the mini-interview is included in the extended entry.

]]> geekitude jheer 2006-06-03T12:48:16-08:00 justice http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000384.html speaking of feeling fine, skilling and lay found guilty of fraud, conspiracy, and a bit of insider trading.

]]> culture jheer 2006-05-25T17:34:46-08:00 feeling fine http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000383.html "Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel?"

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The net-art project We Feel Fine attempts to answer some of these questions through a set of playful yet ambitious visualizations backed by data scraped from thousands of blogs.

For those of a more dichotomous temperament, the same data stream is used to power Lovelines, an interactive exploration of statements of love, hate, and everything in between.

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The projects were created by my friend Sep Kamvar and his collaborator Jonathan Harris (also responsible for the Webby-winning 10x10 and WordCount visualizations). Should you have any related ideas of your own, the two have made the results of their continual blog-crawling available to all in the form of a public web API.

]]> geekitude jheer 2006-05-23T11:44:50-08:00 vizster on tv http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000382.html The Vizster social network visualization by danah boyd and I was used on the CBS crime drama Numb3rs! In the March 3 episode "Protest", the software was used to help illustrate the concept of social networks. Check out the clip:

]]> geekitude jheer 2006-04-20T19:16:27-08:00 bernal burning http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000379.html Bernal Heights Park in San Francisco caught on fire tonight, up at the top of the hill, two blocks above my apartment. We worriedly watched it spread, as winds blew it steadily to the east. Fire crews arrived on the scene and went to work on the blaze with both the hose and the pick axe. At one point, a firefighter perched on a steep part of the hill slipped, falling towards the fire while his hose sprayed around out of control. Fortunately, he caught himself, tackled his wayward hose and went back to work. Overall, they made quick work of putting it out, saving the rest of the park (as well as our homes).

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I have camera phone photos of the blaze both before and after. I don't know if the cause has been determined. I'll have to check the papers tomorrow...

]]> activity jheer 2005-09-29T21:59:38-08:00 terraforming http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000378.html This is old news, but I need to save some pointers here. Whether you desire a few palm trees or the entire world, Dubai's working on it.

The World - Dubai

]]> culture jheer 2005-06-18T10:45:19-08:00 jobs talk http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000377.html In most arenas, I'll take Cal over Stanford any day. However, I have noticed that Stanford sometimes scores a decent commencement speaker. Minus one style point each for (a) the Horatio Alger rehash and (b) the "oh poor billionaire" pity ploy, but plus ten points for implicitly telling a crowd of exiting stanfordites they may have just wasted fours years of their life and thousands of dollars.

]]> culture jheer 2005-06-15T14:56:53-08:00 those unsightly seams http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000376.html Using multiple monitors on your desktop is great, and studies have shown it works especially well when different tasks/tools break up cleanly amongst the different screens (e.g., excel and e-mail, coding and documentation). It doesn't quite work as well when trying to expand a single window over all the monitors, because the seams between monitors chop up the space and introduce discontinuities.

This brief ZDNet article mentions some of the wonderful large display work at microsoft research, but the article of course neglects to mention the issue of seams. With multiple monitors, lines/curves become discontinuous, and what should be single elements get chopped up into pieces. This wreaks a bit of havoc with gestalt perception and in my opinion decreases the aesthetic experience of the interface.

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What are the solutions? Large displays without seams is one (and microsoft and others are already working on this). For today's consumers, a reasonable stop-gap may be to make interfaces seam-aware, allowing layout and presentation of interfaces to take seams into account (e.g., excel spreadsheet cells could automatically realign to improve readability across monitors). Jock Mackinlay and I devised one approach to building seam-awareness into interfaces, though things being what they are, I don't expect to see it on desktops anytime soon :)

]]> geekitude jheer 2005-06-11T12:24:01-08:00 intel eats apple? http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000374.html Speculative, but a real fun read.

]]> geekitude jheer 2005-06-09T18:17:22-08:00 enron corpus viewer http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000373.html Our first design iteration (v1::white) of a visualization of the Enron e-mail corpus was recently posted on boingboing!

Our second design iteration (v2::grey, with temporal filtering and search) was just presented last week at a great e-mail visualization workshop hosted at the University of Maryland by Ben Shneiderman, Adam Perer, and Douglas Oard. Check it out...


]]> geekitude jheer 2005-06-08T16:36:45-08:00 typedrawing http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000372.html dizzy.gif
TYPEDRAWiNG is pretty cool.

]]> culture jheer 2005-05-23T16:10:29-08:00 acceptable risk http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000371.html As of April 28, the yes men struck again, and the Dow company has been given an identity correction.

]]> culture jheer 2005-05-04T08:37:58-08:00 vizster online http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000370.html Tempered by a successful installation and a paper submission, the project page for the Vizster social network browser is now online. Don't just look, touch.

]]> geekitude jheer 2005-05-01T13:03:04-08:00