Jorinde Voigt, whose rule-based, hand-drawn systems art I've been a fan of ever since Julian introduced me a few months back. Her work shows an interest in stochasticity, networks, complexity and the visualisation of musical structure.
Following a friend's recent interest in Thing Theory, I dug up my copy of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things from the storeroom (not quite a junkspace but definitely a pile of space-junk). Leafing through I was reminded of the array of (typo)graphical techniques employed by the book's designer Lorraine Wild, with the visual linkage device above being my favourite.
I see this as a form of what I would call augmented textuality; a superposition of layered semantic relationships on text. Having recently read the thought-provoking iA article on bringing web design concepts to newspapers, I'm wondering if the web couldn't learn something from book designers in terms of augmentation. In this example, I think there's scope for a javascript-based implementation to draw Bezier curves between anchors in HTML using canvas to achieve the visual linkage effect.
Wild also uses type variations in a single text body to convey meaning, with a number of typefaces reserved for particular neologisms or words imbued with specialist definitions in Sterling's lexicon. I find it a bit naive/obnoxious, depends on your typographic stance. The web-based alternative might be to re-examine link typologies, since the consistency mantra in web design tends to crowd out attempts at applying multiple link styles to a single body, creating a homogeneity of linkage on a site-by-site basis that is bemusing if you take a step back. With regards to keywords and specially loaded (technical) terms however, I probably prefer the approach taken by the English language version of Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis,
The text of which possesses a good rhythm, induced by both typographic and linguistic techniques. A mix of bold and italicised emphasis abound, the former reserved for words with significantly enhanced meanings in the hands of Lefebvre. It's simple but makes a difference. That the book itself is on rhythm makes it doubly effective.
A disproportionate amount — disproportionate given how much online text I've read daily over the past decade — of the ideas that have influenced me over the years have come from books or essays. A lot of that no doubt has to do with copyright and IP, but some of it is down to the forms of communication themselves. Whereas the web has naturally gravitated towards networked/collaborative knowledge systems, the essay, in contrast, is standalone and demands sustained attention.
The essay and the academic research paper are still amongst the foremost textual knowledge communication formats around, despite having a fairly antagonistic relationship with the web, the former seemingly sidelined by the blog post and the latter still published as a PDF or print artefact. I'll reserve my ideas on modern research publishing for the web (itself such a huge topic) for another time, but I simply think there's scope to improve on these knowledge forms in Webby ways, without stripping them of their fundamental offerings. For example, I would love to see a web publishing engine dedicated to the essay form.
Here's a quick implementation of some crude augmented textuality techniques using HTML5 and Javascript, applied to a Rem Koolhaas essay, the hyperbolic diatribe, Junkspace, from 2001:
→ View Augmented Junkspace Demo
The techniques are completely web native (though you'll need recent versions of Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view them). You could argue this is no longer an essay but a thinly disguised term frequency vector smattered with relational graphics, a set of wordnets or a pliable series of strings. Perhaps. I would apologise to Rem if it wasn't a calculated attempt at altering the state of the text through superposition, an uninvited act of post-production.
If you're an IE user, I guess you can make do with this graphic for now:
- Michael Jackson, Original Solo Recordings, 1972-1997 (view medium size, view large size)
Last week I was at Music Hackday, messing around with music data at The Guardian offices in Kings Cross, London. The outcome is this Michael Jackson doughnut, which spans the whole of his solo recording career, showing which of his tracks have been the most popular & loved by Last.fm listeners, as well as which releases have been the most influential and loved. The graphic was programmatically produced and could be produced for other artists quite easily.
Some notes on how to read this information graphic: The size of each slice is proportional to the number of plays of that particular track or release compared to the total number of plays of Michael Jackson's material on Last.fm. The darkness of the slice indicates how loved that track or album is by the listener base. Tracks are organised by album, by date, starting with his first solo record, Ben, from 1972.
Some notes on the metrics: The graphic takes into account 6 months worth of Last.fm listening data, that's 3,606,823 individual plays of his tracks by 1,432,458 listeners worldwide. The loving data spans a shorter time period, a little over two months; this period contains data which falls both before and after his death. The love data for releases is normalised by track count, so the darkness of the blue hue expresses the average number of loves per track on said release.
In the case of (countless) albums featuring re-releases of original works, such as Number Ones, I have aggregated play counts and merged them into a single play count for the original recording (e.g. Billie Jean). This is why you don't see releases like HiStory (Book 1) or The Essential Michael Jackson in the graphic. The playcounts on original tracks which are featured on those records, however, do contribute to the tracks shown in the graphic, as I'm trying to get a feel for which of his original recordings are the most influential overall.
Some notes on the tech: I spent much of the 4-8 hours it took to produce the software coming up with ways of cleaning the data. The gap in the doughnut represents the proportion of plays which relate to live versions, endless remixes (official & unofficial) and collaborations (duets etc). I chose to keep these in the dataset in order to represent proportionally how much attention goes towards that kind of material. I also stripped a lot of seemingly badly tagged, or dubiously attributed tracks using a bunch of filters aided by my observation of the dataset. I used simple Levenshtein distances to merge tracknames together and a few simple transforms to help the merging process. The merging operation was crucial because some tracks have been officially re-released over 30 times and the metadata can vary a little each time. The graphic was produced using PHP & Actionscript with JSON as the transport mechanism between the two.
Popularity and love data is from Last.fm, release dates are from Musicbrainz and Discogs was used for authoritative discographic data.
Lastly, just a note on the motivation - MJ was primarily a childhood experience for me (I was 6 when Bad was released), and the hours I've spent with the dataset have given me the time to reflect on what a grip his older material has had on my generation's collective identity. As the notion of a mainstream, backed as it is by broadcast media, gives way to thousands of niches in disparate networks, it's hard not to see MJ as a relic of an age of mass cultural experience that is slowly receding into the distance. R.I.P. MJ.
Christopher Adjei and Nils Holland-Cunz have published a thesis entitled Visualizing Last.fm. The website's in German, but you can see an analysis of individual user tastes by genre, geographic fluctuations in artist fans over time (correlated to concerts), some listening trends on new releases and geographic listening trends by genre. It's a great array of information visualizations based on our APIs.
Most Fridays we hold talks known as 'osmotics' at Last.fm. Their purpose is to share understanding about the various things that are going on in different departments; an open session which anyone can use to present recent work. It's a response to our growth, as it's now impossible to know what's happening throughout the company at any given point in time.
A few weeks back I presented some of the work we've been doing on interaction path analysis. As web developers we're completely spoilt for usage information on our apps, and interaction histories are sitting in our apache logs the entire time. We've been using tools to mine these and better understand real interaction flows on our site, in order to improve our understanding of common use cases.
You'll often find that your users don't use your software exactly as you designed for. That's natural, and as web developers we need to be equipped to observe these flows and adapt/optimize our software accordingly. As Stewart Brand observed of buildings, so too good software should learn from usage patterns rather than working against them. A good app should flow.
We use a tool suite from Omniture - the pricing may well be out of reach of most startups, but anyone can mine apache logs to get similar information. Bear in mind the presentation assumes no technical knowledge and was prepared in about 20 minutes - it's more of a lightning talk than anything. I've blacked out some sensitive bits of information.
→ Interaction Path Analysis - slides with annotations (1.1MB)
Hackney Coat of Arms (source: Wikipedia)
The border of blue and white wavy lines represents the water of the rivers and canals on or near the borough's boundaries. The red and white Maltese Cross and the black and white background, like that in the arms of the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, commemorates the Orders of the Knights Templar and Knights of St. John. The Knights Templar wore a red Maltese Cross on white surcoats and mantles and the Knights of St. John wore black surcoats and mantles with a white Maltese Cross on the left breast. In 1312 the Knights Templar were suppressed and their lands and rents, including those in Hackney, were transferred to the Knights of St. John. The two golden oak trees with red acorns derive from the arms of the Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington and recall the forest which once covered the northern part of the Borough. The three golden bells represent the Bells of St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch, referred to in the nursery rhyme. "Oranges and Lemons". The Crest consists of a representation of the tower of the former Parish Church of St. Augustine, Hackney, which is the only part now standing and the only scheduled Ancient Monument within the Borough. The green mound, represents the island in the River Lea - "Hacon's Eyot" - from which the name "Hackney" is thought by some authorities to have been derived.
From civicheraldry.co.uk
Galileo inlines empirical observations of Saturn with text in what Tufte claims "may be the best piece of analytical design ever done", in Sidereus Nuncius ('Starry Messenger') , 1610.
Also check Tufte's note on Galileo only ever once stating in print that the Earth moves.
I wrote a piece for the New Statesman this week on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of ambient intimacy. It's pretty short and doesn't delve too deep, but such are the limitations of print. You can read it in full here.
Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That's how much information we create in a year - 92% of it is stored on magnetic media. It's time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.- Peter Morville, "Ambient Findability", citing "How Much Information?"