Project B Is Coming

This is not my Project B Rationale blog. It is just letting you know I am still alive and kicking and working on my project of course.

It has taken a while to decide what I am doing for my project. Originally I was going tell a story of the journey my Grandfather took when he enlisted to fight in WWII. Unforunately he died while in action in Crete. It is also really hard getting family history since my Father and Aunty are no longer alive.(No violins please) It would have involved a lot of research at the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial which would have taken up far too much time researching. So I decided to work on datavisualization.

The datavisualization will be based on stats from my website www.fandangle.com.au . Sounds great, except my ISP's CPanel doesn't have access to the Raw Access Logs to do a proper analysis of the data. But all is not lost. I can copy and paste stats from Awstats on the ISP's CPanel. Not as detailed as I would have liked.

To format the data properly I created a visual basic program to save a lot of manual copy/paste/edit etc work. The project will utilize Google Visualization API using Google Maps and Google Earth. Sounds easy. Not really. It will involve a lot of technical work. The first visualization will be a map displaying a number of pin point markers showing what countries visitors to my website have come from. To use the Google Map API, I have to provide the country names, country abreviation codes and latitude/longitude coordinates of the various countries. Then there is the HTML and Java codes I have to manipulate. I might make a visual basic program to do this automatically for me. It may lead to a tool I can offer on my website so that anyone interested in Google Maps as a datavisualiztion tool can generate the code to embed the maps on their website or blog.

When it comes to a project this size I don't want to do it just for the sake of my studies. There needs to be a reason why I'm doing this work. So the other reason for doing this project is so I can monitor my website traffic. I have Google Adsense ads (Call me a capitalist - we have to survive some how) on my website and need to increase my traffic to increase my monetizing chances.

I can see this project will end up being an on going venture, because I would like to eventually make a PHP application using MySQL on a LAMP (Linux) server to help in website log statistical analysis.

So that is the state I am in at present. Please stay tuned for the continuing story.

References
Google Visualization API: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/
National Archive of Australia: http://www.naa.gov.au/
Australia War Memorial: http://www.awm.gov.au/
My Website: http://www.fandangle.com.au
CPanel: http://www.cpanel.net/
Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/
Google Earth: http://earth.google.com/
Google Adsense: http://www.Google.com.au/AdSense
MySQL: http:/www.mysql.com
PHP: http://www.php.net/

Read more Entry>>

Project B - Datavisualisation Or Not?

Project B is fast approaching. I'm still doing research on my project and starting to think I have bitten off more than I can chew.

After doing to research on Data Visualisation there is a heap of tools that will help you create various methods of displaying your data. Do a Google search for datavisualisation tools and datavisualization tools.

Here are some examples:

Data Visualisation: Tools and Examples - Written by Matthew Solle

Googles TouchGraph - a Java application that reveals the network of connectivity between websites as reported by Google's database of related sites.

IBM's Manyeyes application to create datavisualisation

New York Times Visualization Lab - has a variety of examples that will inspire you

Processing is an open source programming language to program images, animation and interactions. It teaches you computer programming within a visual context.

Here are some examples of what can be achieve using Processing

Prefuse Visualization Toolkit - Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Examples of what you can do with Prefuse

I hope this has been helpful to your Univeristy of Canberra Networked Media Productions assignment Project B.

...........................................................................................
References:
Data Visualisation/Matthew Solle
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/3619

Googles TouchGraph
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

IBM Manyeyes
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/

New York Times Visualization Lab
http://vizlab.nytimes.com/visualizations

Processing
http://processing.org/
Processing Gallery
http://processing.org/exhibition/index.html

Prefuse Visualization Toolkit
http://prefuse.org/
Prefuse Gallery
http://prefuse.org/gallery/ Read more Entry>>

Inforgraphics and Data Visualisation

Data Visualisation is used to communicate statistical information in an efficient way so the observer can understand the meaning of data. Since its early development using computer graphics in the 1950's, a significant boost was given to the field with the appearance, in 1987, of the NSF report "Visualisation in Scientific Computing" edited by Bruce H. McCormick, Thomas A. DeFanti and Maxine D. Brown.

Infographics
Information Graphics or infographics as it is known is a means of displaying detailed information using images and in some cases animations in detail a simplified manner so the viewer can understand what the information is trying to convey.

Here is an animation that uses Infographics that expands and adds more detail to the Little Red Riding Hood fantasy story. It uses various forms of infographics which is very inspiring as to what creative approaches can be used to display information.

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Data Visualisation
Computers have the capacity to assess, calculate, read and compare data at extremely high speeds. With the introduction of computer databases which can store a vast amount of data, computers can analyze, assess and calculate the relevance of that data to determine for example the affects of climate change, astrological research, financial growth, projections and down turns etc. Data Visualisation is a graphical way of communicating data to humans that is easy to understand.

For example Hans Rossling, professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute had developed the breakthrough Trendalyzer software through his nonprofit Gapminder Foundation. This software was acquired by Google. Trendalyzer is able to visualise data from the UN (United Nations), and animate it which reveals a lot about the economic, birth rates, wealth and life expentancy of countries around the world.

Here is an amazing video where Hans Rossling explains the data visualization potential of Trendalyzer and how the world can learn more if data stored in various institutions, government organizations and businesses were made freely accessable.




Data Visualisation is part of my Networked Media Production University studies at the University of Canberra. Infographics and Data Visualisation has been a real eye opener for me. It just shows the vast opportunities available to media producers. As students we are constantly reminded that we are the future of new media production technologies that are evolving and advancing the communication potential of media on the internet.

References
Data Visualization Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_visualization

16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools:
http://mashable.com/2007/05/15/16-awesome-data-visualization-tools/

5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year
http://flowingdata.com/2008/12/19/5-best-data-visualization-projects-of-the-year/

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

Information Visualization & Visual Communication
http://infosthetics.com/

Little Red Riding Hood - INfographics
Vimeo link: http://www.vimeo.com/3514904

Hans Rosling
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/hans_rosling.html
http://videolectures.net/google_rossling_dtwm/

University of Canberra:
http://www.canberra.edu.au
Read more Entry>>

We Are The Web

We Are The Web
I started reading this article "We are the web", which is part of our University studies. It is interesting reading the article "We are the Web", because it takes you through the history of the internet, it’s growth, the changes and new methods of using the internet. The article starts discussing Netscapes IPO. IPO refers to when a private company decides to go public, meaning the stock market. IPO means Initial Public Offering. This lead to reading another article I searched on the internet about Netscape called "Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web". I would recommend you read it. I remember a little about Netscape and it’s run in with Microsoft, so I read the article to get the right information on what really happened.

My discovery of Netscape and the Internet
Now I remember going to my local library about, 1994/95 doing some research on photography and filmmaking. In the middle of the library was a computer, just one computer. In my view it was just another toy to play with. I went up to the counter and enquired about the computer. The librarian took me to the computer and explained it could be used for research on the internet. I had heard from a friend a little about the internet but it was no big deal. I paused for a moment and asked her “What is the internet?” She logged into the computer and opened what she called a web browser. It was called Netscape and she went to a search engine called Yahoo. This was all new to me so I played around with the computer, putting in different search requests to see what this Internet thingy had come up with. In fact I visited the library quite a lot. Not so much to borrow books but to explore this new world called the internet. One thing led to another and I started borrowing books on computers and the world wide web. Next thing you know I’m creating my own website.

The article "We are the Web" then goes on saying that the internet was made possible by a simple HTML tag called the hyperlink we all take for granted now.

Why say We are the Web
As an example there was a time when the web was being categorized for search engines using the Taxonomy method.

What is Taxonomy
Specialist people were employed to categorize websites and their content in an effort to categorize the internet and make it more user friendly. They used the Taxonomy method. This is categorizing subjects into hierarchal categories. But to use this system you had to search through each category to find the information you were looking for. Sometimes the categories you search through don’t lead you to the information you were looking for so you had to back track through the categories and start through another category tree. This at times was very frustrating.

Folksonomy
Folksonomy is why we are the web. Rather than employ specialist people to categorize the internet, why not use the users themselves. This is where tags come in. For instance, if you have a delicious account to store your book marks, you write a description and create a tag meaning a word or list of words you would categorize the web page under. Not only does a search engine get a list of tags or categories of a webpage they also get a description. We folks are now the categorizers. That is what the term folksonomy means. These tags would then become what is called Metadata. We can also use Metadata in our websites which helps search engines categorize our webpage when their robots crawl websites.

Here is another example of why we are the web with Amazon.com. When a person purchases a product, they can also write a review about the product such as a movie. You are the reviewer of the movie and there are possibly many other people who have written a review on what they think of the film and if they would recommend it.

Then there is Social Networking sites such Youtube sharing videos along with MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious and many more. The user which is you are contributing to the internet.

We are the Web.
The virtual world or cyberspace of the internet is changing, evolving at a very fast rate. This is made possible by the contribution of content produced by millions if not billions of users on the internet. We as internet users now have the power to contribute and expand the knowledge, ideas, technical possibilities and the future of the internet.

What will the internet be like in the next 10 years? I’m sorry I don’t have a crystal ball to work that one out. We have to wait 10 years for that answer.


References
Wired: We are the web:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html?pg=3&topic=tech&topic_set=
Remembering Netscape – The birth of the Web: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/index.htm
Taxonomy Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy
Folksonomy Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com
Delicious: http://www.delicous.com
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com Read more Entry>>