Category Archives: Blog

Academic Papers Artwork baby names Blog blogging democracy Design ethics Facebook firefox Flickr folksonomies Google Google Docs Google Spreadsheets how-to information-architecture information-retrieval information design internet iphone journalism listserv mailing list maps mass media Online News Papers Photography plugin poll social-bookmarking social networking social software spam tagging trust Twitter Usability web-development Web2.0 webspam web standards WordPress Writing

Doing my small part to preserve digital history

Blog, , , , , , , ,

High cirrus clouds and low fog over the Pacific Ocean Years ago, in an undergrad course, one the of the school’s librarians gave a talk about the big risk of the move to digital publishing – historical preservation.  We know what the ancient Greeks thought in part because their words were carved into stone – would we be so lucky if they had used floppy disks?

I wasn’t completely convinced that the situation was so dire then, and I’m still not really worried.  The production and storage of information continues to grow exponentially, and I think the real problem for future archeologists will be dealing with information overload rather than some hypothetical gap in the written record.  But I have been thinking a lot about my own digital history lately so I spent part of this weekend looking at old papers from college and publishing them on my site.

I don’t think my meager efforts will be much help to future historians (much less reverse the entropy of the universe), but I did find some interesting stuff that I probably should have posted for the world to see a long time ago.

For example:

The more I dig up and paste into my WordPress archives the more I realize a few things.  First, a distinct lack of content between undergrad and grad school – I’m doing a much better job of writing without assignments now than I did then.  Second, a hard drive crash in 2003 resulted in a gap in my saved emails – this hurts more now that I’m looking back through things.  Finally, I need to make a point, for the rest of my life, to just put things out there. It seems like such a shame that I put work into these docs just to have them rot on my hard drive.

I know some of my co-workers, Reid and Wysz, have gone through the process of resurrecting old content to their current website.  Anyone else thinking about doing something similar?  What prompted you to do so?  Or, what prevented you?

I’m an old-timer when it comes to the Internet

Blog, , , , ,

Polaroid photos of old wreckers found in the desk Back when I was in college I did an interview with a journalism student at Kent State about online publishing.  I ran across it sort of randomly on my hard drive and thought I would share how I described my relationship with the Internet:

I’m an old-timer when it comes to the Internet.  I began playing around online some time in middle school, back when everything was text and the Internet was more or less just a way to pass messages between local bulletin board systems and universities.  I made my first web site back in high school, and it was a pretty pathetic homepage.

Wow, eight years ago (!) I already described myself as an old-timer.  It’s strange how so much of my life has revolved around the web and kind of fitting that I’m now on a team that helps safegaurd it.

Map App of the Day: A genetic map of Europe

Blog, , , , , ,

I’m a bit of a map geek and a big fan of using maps to convey information geographic and otherwise, so I’m starting a new series of posts – Map App of the Day.  I’ll highlight either a mapping web application or an application of mapping in information design that’s interesting, innovative, or just plain strange.

The New York Times had a brief article about a new study of genetic relationships between peoples in Europe.  The paper, by Lao et al., looked at genotype data from more than 2000 individuals spread throughout Europe.  The map on the right shows the normal geographic map of Europe, while the one on the left maps the genetic relationships between countries.

Here’s a link to a larger version on Current Biology’s web site.

The genetic map is a great example of why you should always consider mapping to illustrate data with a geographic component, and why you should always consider breaking the rules a bit  to get a good representation (most maps don’t show countries overlapping, for example).

This is also a great illustration of how permeable and impermanent national borders really are.  It would be interesting to see the same analysis done with distinctive populations like the Basque in Spain and the Sami in Finland added.

This also brings up with two non-mapping issues about journalism and research.  First off, the NYT article didn’t bother to actually link to the journal article, the researcher’s websites at their respective institutions, or any of the other places that readers would need to go to follow up on this paper or get more detailed information.  Why not?

Second, when I searched for Current Biology I was delighted to see that the journal publishes everything online, available via regular Google search, rather than hiding behind some expensive and proprietary publication database.  Open access is very cool.