Essays, experiments & ideas

Writing.

On data visualization, digital humanities, design, and the ways we make meaning from data.

443 entries · 428 available to read here · 15 publication links

All entries, newest first.

2026-04-29Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Behind-the-Scenes: Semiotic 3 with real-time streaming data
How AI collaboration and a focus on real-time data shaped the third major version of Semiotic.
2025-02-13Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
The 4th Wave: Democratization
With Amanda Makulec: how a shared visual language and more accessible tools can broaden participation in data visualization.
Amanda Makulec & Elijah Meeks
2025-02-11Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
The 4th Wave: A Changing World
With Amanda Makulec: the expanding public role of charts, and what comes after the third wave of data visualization.
Amanda Makulec & Elijah Meeks
2025-01-27Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
This Map Helps Fascists
An argument about map projections, political framing, and why the apparent size of a country is a misleading guide to its importance.
2024-06-13Read here
Confluent on Medium
Should My Data Be a Table or a Chart? Yes.
When we came over to Confluent from Noteable, we brought with us ideas gained from our notebooks users regarding how to improve the display of data for stronger understanding and better decision-making. We knew these ideas could also…
2023-08-30Read here
Medium
Are Connected Scatterplots Unreadable?
Recently Nick Desbarats wrote a piece on Nightingale criticizing connected scatterplots as being less effective than traditional line charts for presenting time series data. In general, the arguments focus on the inaccessibility of the…
2023-05-23Read here
Noteable on Medium
One Week Into The Future of Analytics
In case you didn’t see our announcement a little over a week ago, Noteable officially released its plugin for ChatGPT that allows you to create an entire data-driven document with only a prompt. We saw the natural language functionality of…
2023-05-15Read here
Noteable on Medium
Revolutionize How You Make Data-Driven Decisions with Noteable’s ChatGPT Plugin
It’s been so exciting to use the new Noteable plugin for ChatGPT. This plugin enables you to create a computational notebook with just a simple prompt. That means if you’ve never used notebooks before or even if you’ve never coded a single…
2023-05-11Read here
Noteable on Medium
Notebooks for Everyone
The capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT have grown even stronger with the release of Noteable’s notebook plugin. Now, users from all backgrounds can use natural language prompts to create computational notebooks with exploratory analysis,…
2023-04-21Read here
Medium
The New Science of LLMs
The emergence of large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, has revolutionized the way we process, generate, and interpret natural language. These AI-driven models have demonstrated unparalleled proficiency in understanding…
2023-04-03Read here
Medium
Introducing Data Prism, The Automatic Chart Builder
At Noteable we’re proud to provide you with DEX, the best-in-class no-code data visualization tool available in a data notebook. DEX gives you an integrated BI tool in your notebook, enabling you to explore and explain your data without…
2023-03-09Read here
Noteable on Medium
Understanding Change Over Time with Time Series Charts
Change over time is a key area of analysis for any data that has time as a characteristic. And there is no more familiar, friendly and effective way of looking at change over time as the line chart. But there are variations — and…
2023-03-01Read here
Noteable on Medium
You Might Be Uncertain About ChatGPT but Have You Ever Wondered What ChatGPT is Uncertain About?
Like all of you, I’ve been intrigued by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I’ve asked it questions about lime trees and ethics and DBT and come away impressed and, let’s be honest, more than a little scared. But more than anything else, I’ve chatted with…
2021-09-27Read here
Noteable on Medium
Data Visualization Has a Taxonomy Problem
Learning data visualization, teaching data visualization, and evaluating data visualization tools have one thing in common: long lists of different kinds of charts. Depending on the mode you’re in, these chart lists define what you don’t…
2021-06-15Read here
Noteable on Medium
Designing for the Data Visualization Lifecycle
Everywhere you look today, and especially in a data-driven organization, you’ll find data visualization. Data visualization is key to how modern companies create impact. It’s built into every tool and workflow. It’s an important part of…
2019-12-30Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream
A reflection on the year data visualization reached broader audiences and became a more visible part of public life.
2019-08-07Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
2019 Annual Data Visualization Survey Results
An introduction to findings from the 2019 annual survey of the data visualization community.
2019-08-02Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
We Live in a World of Funnels
Funnels as both a visualization technique and an online experience, with a focus on the tension between precision and accuracy.
2019-07-22Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Announcing Nightingale!
Introducing Nightingale as the journal of the Data Visualization Society and explaining the publication’s name and ambitions.
2019-06-26Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Choose Your Own Beyoncé
Exploring the branching structure of a Twitter choose-your-own-adventure through a network visualization of Beyoncé’s assistant’s choices.
2019-06-07Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Can You Know A Book Better Without Reading It?
An exploration of how visualization and distant reading can reveal structures and meanings that conventional reading may miss.
2019-05-15Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Why do we love data-driven badges?
Why members embraced personalized data badges, and what a playful Easter-egg variation reveals about identity and visual encoding.
2019-02-27Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Societatea Vizualizărilor de Date
Romanian translation of the founding introduction to the Data Visualization Society.
2019-02-23Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Presentando la Sociedad de Visualización de Datos
Spanish translation of the founding introduction to the Data Visualization Society.
2019-02-20Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
Introducing the Data Visualization Society
With Amy Cesal and Mollie Pettit: the founding vision for a professional community spanning data, visualization, and society.
Elijah Meeks, Amy Cesal & Mollie Pettit
2019-01-15Read here
Towards Data Science
Exploratory Design in Data Visualization
This article is a collaboration between myself and Jason Forrest and if you haven’t, check out his article exploring your relationship with your audience so that they trust you enough to…
2018-12-07Read elsewhere ↗
Nightingale
3rd Wave Data Visualization
The Tapestry keynote essay on the convergence of visualization tools, audiences, and modes of expression.
2018-07-02Read here
Towards Data Science
You Can Design a Good Chart with R
Last week dataviz twitter was abuzz when Edward Tufte bemoaned the inability of R to create nice-looking graphs with good labels and annotations. He suggested that the only way to get to the kind of quality charts he’s promoted in his…
2018-06-21Read here
Medium
2018 Data Visualization Survey Results
In May, I put out a call to fill out a survey directed at people who do professional data visualization. It received 628 responses (down from 1000 last year) and the processed and cleaned results have been uploaded onto a GitHub repo…
2018-06-11Read here
Medium
D3 is not a Data Visualization Library
D3.js is an incredibly successful library yet there’s a disconnect between what people think D3 does and what it actually does. As a result, learning D3 is intimidating and confusing. By better understanding its structure and separating it…
2018-06-06Read here
nteract
Designing the nteract Data Explorer
I spend most of my professional time designing and building data products — analytical applications like data dashboards or data visualization prototypes for understanding algorithms or datasets. A significant but still much smaller amount…
2018-05-21Read here
Medium
WHAT CHARTS DO
The most important thing about a chart is not its aesthetics, the technology used to create it, the kind of data visualization layout or even the data it represents. The most important thing about a chart is its impact. Impact is what a…
2018-05-14Read here
Medium
WHAT CHARTS MEAN
You probably don’t notice data visualization in media like I do. Whether it’s a terrible 3D donut chart or the beautiful but impenetrable displays made by Territory Studios, shows and movies are filled with…
2018-05-07Read here
Medium
Data Visualization, Fast and Slow
There are dozens of books and workshops and online tutorials teaching you how to make good data visualization. But what is good data visualization? You probably think it’s fast — charts that are quickly understood or charts that are…
2018-05-07Read here
Medium
WHAT CHARTS SAY
All charts say something. They are a form of communication and we can evaluate them as such. Like any other statement, a chart says something explicitly — by which I mean a chart really does have that “show me the data” quality. But that’s…
2018-04-29Read here
Medium
Making Annotations First-Class Citizens in Data Visualization
I’m convinced that annotations are where we’re going to see the next wave of innovation in data visualization. I’ve been thinking about annotations in large part because Susie Lu released d3-annotation (and later, react-annotation for data…
2018-04-27Read here
Medium
Viz Palette for Data Visualization Color
Earlier this month, Susie Lu and I released Viz Palette, a tool to help data visualization designers evaluate and improve their palettes. It shows the palette in use across a variety of data visualization types but also measures the…
2018-04-05Read here
Medium
Designing a Data Visualization Dashboard Like It was a Game
In my last piece on video games and data visualization, I explored in a general way the similarity between video games and data visualization products. Here, I’ll focus in on specific attributes of charts and analytical applications that,…
2018-03-30Read here
Medium
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Data Visualization
Susie Lu’s article on storytelling in explanatory data visualization hit on themes with which I’ve often wanted to engage. Her focus was on the challenges of dealing with story in the framework of dynamic datasets, and I was most intrigued…
2018-02-23Read here
Medium
Visualizing Archer
Don’t like reading? Prefer GIFs? Skip this whole article and visit the site…
2018-02-15Read here
Medium
What is a Senior Data Visualization Engineer?
I was asked recently on twitter a question that I’ve been asked in one form or another several times since I became a Senior Data Visualization Engineer at…
2018-01-29Read here
Medium
Color Advice for Data Visualization with D3.js
D3.js has done so much to advance the practice and theory of data visualization. Without much effort you can find examples of visualizations of algorithms, time, mechanical principles, gender discrimination, and yes, even the army of a…
2018-01-16Read here
Medium
Semiotic Lessons & Goals
Semiotic is a React-based data visualization framework I began developing for internal applications at Netflix. It’s designed to emphasize information modeling, an approach I found to be optimized for internal analytical applications…
2017-11-27Read here
Medium
D3.js in Action, Second Edition
The 2nd edition of D3.js in Action was officially published today. It’s eleven chapters of full-color, in-depth exploration of the most popular data visualization library in JavaScript and one of the most popular JavaScript projects more…
2017-09-11Read here
Medium
Sketchy Data Visualization in Semiotic
When I open-sourced Semiotic, I expected to get some pushback on its support for hand-drawn “sketchy” rendering in marks. I also expected some questions as to how it and its accompanying “painty” mode are implemented. Instead, except for a…
2017-09-04Read here
Medium
Using Semiotic if You’ve Never Used React
I released Semiotic to help folks using React deploy better data visualization. But since announcing its release I’ve heard from a few people who want to try to develop with Semiotic but have never gotten into React. So I thought I’d give…
2017-09-01Read here
Medium
Introducing Semiotic for Data Visualization
Semiotic is a React-based data visualization framework. You can see interactive documentation and examples here. It satisfies the need for reusable data visualization, without committing to a static set of charting types. It came out of a…
2017-08-12Read here
Medium
Alluvial Charts and Their Discontents
The Sankey diagram is increasingly popular for data visualization. Like all network diagrams, a sankey diagram represents explicit connections between elements. It represents an explicit system, rather than a simple collection of…
2017-05-05Read here
Medium
Interactive Applications with React & D3
Bringing together D3.js and React is one of those things that isn’t new but is still not well-established enough to point to one sure way to do it. In this excerpt from my book D3.js in Action, Second Edition, I’ll show you the main…
2017-04-11Read here
Medium
Strategic Innovation in Data Visualization Will Not Come From Tech
Capital One hired Kim Rees as its Head of Data Visualization. Kim Rees, famous in data visualization circles for helming Periscopic while it created iconic works and won awards. Capital One, the bank that sends you a thousand credit card…
2017-04-01Read here
Medium
Introducing Animalia.js for System Visualization
But following Chaucer, “Ful ofte in game a sooth I have herd” and in that vein there are some ideas here that I feel are worth pursuing, and I’ll probably build a very simple version of a cephalopod chart generator at some point. No…
2017-03-27Read here
Medium
How to Remake Historical Data Visualization and Why You Should
W. E. B. Du Bois pioneered the sociological study of race in America. He was a founder of the NAACP. In text and speech, he described the struggle of African Americans in a time of legal segregation and widespread lynching. He also created…
2017-03-21Read here
Medium
If Data Visualization is So Hot, Why Are People Leaving?
There are prominent theorists and practitioners in data visualization that simply do not believe there is such a thing as a dedicated data visualization role in industry. For those critics there is no profession, only a skill used near the…
2017-03-16Read here
Medium
Defining Custom Data Visualization
“Custom Data Viz is expensive and we’re not sure if it has an impact.” I hear this in industry all the time. And while I think it’s important that we challenge that position, and push forward the use of custom data visualization for…
2017-03-14Read here
Medium
2017 Data Visualization Survey Results
A few weeks back, spurred by a conversation about the state of data visualization in industry, some folks who do data visualization (myself included) put together a survey to find out what doing data visualization professionally meant.…
2017-03-10Read here
Medium
Gestalt Principles for Data Visualization
Gestalt refers to the patterns that you perceive when presented with a few graphical elements. So, for example, from three lines you might see a…
2015-09-01Read here
elijahmeeks.com
Using Complex D3 Layouts
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-08-26Read here
elijahmeeks.com
Complex Data Visualization with D3.js Boot Camp
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-08-17Read here
elijahmeeks.com
Generating palettes the old-fashioned way
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-08-15Read here
elijahmeeks.com
The virtues of a sketchy life
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-08-11Read here
elijahmeeks.com
I Need a Data Consultant
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-08-02Read here
elijahmeeks.com
God Help Me, I Hate d3.scale.category20
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-06-29Read here
elijahmeeks.com
Popular Networks
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-06-13Read here
elijahmeeks.com
On data and capta
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-06-10Read here
elijahmeeks.com
Alluvial Charts and Their Discontents
From the original personal-site archive.
2015-06-08Read here
elijahmeeks.com
A soft launch
From the original personal-site archive.
2014-08-27Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
4 Lessons for Digital Humanities Scholars from Donald Rumsfeld
As digital humanities scholarship matures, it behooves us to look to thinkers outside the field for help in crafting our research agenda and planning our projects. One of those thinkers is Donald Rumsfeld, the Socrates of Strategery, whose…
2014-08-19Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Responsive Data Visualization
The final chapter of my book, D3.js in Action, is focused on explaining using the D3 data visualization library for mobile development. It was a bit of a stretch for me, since I hadn’t done very much mobile development, and I expected to…
2014-05-05Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Digital Humanities and Data Science
I'm proud to announce that Stanford University Library will be bringing on Scott Weingart as a data scientist to help support digital humanities scholarship here at Stanford. Scott is well-known in the digital humanities community for his…
2014-04-28Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Spreadsheets are Information Visualization
Like most valuable human experiences, this all started on Twitter, when I used a tired meme to deliver what I thought would be considered radical to folks not involved with information visualization but rather pat to those that…
2014-04-14Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Neotopology
This is part of a talk I gave at #txdhc. It leaves out "principles of interloping in network science" which I'll try to put in a later…
2014-04-08Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
The Day of DH
Today is the Day of DH, when digital humanities practitioners try to document what a "typical day" looks like in their engagement with digital humanities. There is an official site that hosts blogs from self-identified community members…
2014-03-26Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
What Makes a Minard?
The updated ORBIS is rapidly approaching completion, and with its finishing touches comes the need to describe some of the things that it does. Most of its new functionality, such as the routes or cartograms, are from the earlier version,…
2014-02-09Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Digital Humanities Curio Cabinet
The Online Computer Library Center, or OCLC, submitted the latest in a genre of self-reflection by library leadership focused on where and whether digital humanities intersects with the library. Conveniently, Bethany Nowviskie, head of one…
2014-02-03Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
SUL Digital Humanities Project Support - Call for Proposals
The School of Humanities and Sciences and Stanford University Library invite faculty and graduate students in all areas of the humanities to submit a research project proposal. Projects will be selected on the basis of their significance…
2014-01-06Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Geographics
ORBIS is nearly two years old, and the ongoing update to the site has me once again in conversation with a cartographers, geographers, designers, and digital humanists. A new response I get, when describing the growing feature list of…
2013-09-03Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
ORBIS Design Challenge
Since its launch in May 2012, ORBIS has always been very popular. This is in spite of breaking some fundamental web design rules, such as placing the key interactive element on a non-descript tab rather than the opening page. But the…
2013-08-28Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Kindred Britain Techniques 1: Permalinks on a Graph
Kindred Britain has a handful of patterns and functions that are rather novel in their creation or deployment. In this series, I'll be exploring the methodology and motivation for them, as well as go into some technical detail as to how…
2013-08-26Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Kindred Britain: A sign of our times
Today marks the public release of Kindred Britain, a new interactive scholarly work that explores the role of family in British culture. Integrating geospatial, temporal, and network information visualization, this project attempts to…
2013-08-19Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Discovering Regions with ORBIS v2
A simple demonstration of the kind of higher-level analysis possible with the new cartograms and clustering in the v2 version of ORBIS. This is accomplished entirely within the browser (except for turning it into a gif) first by running…
2013-08-17Read here
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
ORBIS v2
Over the coming months, I'll be spending some time integrating new features, data, and base layers to ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Transportation Network of the Roman Empire. While ORBIS was tremendously successful both in its public…
2013-08-17Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
So long and thanks for all the digital humanities
This site will no longer be updated after this. There will be no new blog posts, nor explorations of TVTropes or Topic Modeling or occasional interviews with indie videogame developers or webcomic…
2013-07-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Is Digital Humanities Too Text-Heavy?
Last week was the marvelous international conference for digital humanities, held this year at beautiful University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Over the course of 4 days, I tried desperately to meet people I only knew from tiny Twitter pictures…
2013-05-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
How Collaboration Works and How It Can Fail
I’ve been working on research-oriented digital humanities projects ever since Ruth Mostern decided to pursue a database version of Hope Wright’s An Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China in 2007. The goals have…
2013-05-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Software Development
I’m coming to the end of a long digital humanities project that involves much coding at the database level and with Javascript for the user-facing frontend. It uses D3.js heavily, and does a few things that I think are innovative and…
2013-05-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Mesoanalysis
With Matt Jockers’ new book out, and the reviews already coming in, I’m starting to find the macroanalysis/microanalysis framework a little lacking. It’s not that I don’t think it a good approach, and it takes many forms in digital…
2013-04-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Big Data Conference
The IEEE International Conference on Big Data in July will feature a workshop on Big Data in digital humanities scholarship–which its organizers refer to as Big…
2013-04-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Movement Expressed in a Method Enshrined In a Tool
Today marks the release of the Journal of Digital Humanities 2.1, focused on topic modeling and with myself and Scott Weingart as guest editors. It is an excellent collection of material about topic models and topic modeling and their…
2013-03-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Cutting Room Floor
The recent release of City Nature leaves behind several static, dynamic, and interactive pieces that, for one reason or another, were not integrated into the final site. One of the reasons I created this blog was to showcase the work I was…
2013-03-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
City Nature
Today we’re releasing City Nature, the results of work exploring natural environments in urban areas using topic modeling, GIS, and data visualization. The site has rich interactivity, including an amazing parallel coordinates plot that…
2013-03-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Toward a Connected Humanities
Zephyr Frank and Erik Steiner were kind enough to give me a chance to discuss networks in humanities scholarship for the Visualizing Evidence course here at Stanford. Here’s the…
2013-02-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Color and Precision
Color has been bothering me lately. To get to color, though, we have to take a short digression into space. You see, a lesson you learn early on in spatial analysis is that just because your GIS package gives you 12 points of decimal…
2013-02-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Donkey
Advice animals are a long-established method of passing along knowledge and learning about subject matter, especially academic. But I have found no Digital Humanities advice animal, and so I offer up the only slightly used ORBIS donkey. I…
2013-02-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Martin Evans
When I first came to Stanford University and I was expected to “do digital humanities” without quite knowing what that meant, I had the very good fortune to work with Martin Evans, a professor in the English Department and a Miltonist.…
2013-02-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship
Visual notes of my talk about digital humanities in high school…
2013-02-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Learning Network Analysis and Representation with a Pedagogical Toy
In the coming weeks, I’ll be teaching several workshops on humanities network analysis and representation using…
2013-01-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Accidental Plagiarism
Karl Grossner, my colleague here at Stanford who I work with supporting digital humanities research, got a chance to read my previous post on geospatial information visualization. Karl’s got a PhD in geography and a bit of experience with…
2013Read here
Journal of Digital Humanities
The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling
An introduction to the interpretive and methodological contributions of humanities scholarship to topic modeling.
Elijah Meeks & Scott B. Weingart
2012-12-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Possibility and Probability in Geospatial Information Visualization
Doing digital humanities often means producing digital geographic maps*. These maps increasingly provide a wide range of spatial objects to represent and as a result tend to present a mix of traditional cartographic principles: Simple…
2012-11-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Good Data, Bad Data
One of the projects I’m supporting this year is an analysis of neighborhood similarity of cities in the United States. The similarity measure is based off a set of attributes and can be represented as a matrix, which can then be…
2012-10-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities Specialist Call for Proposals 2013
Proposals are now being accepted for digital humanities support of research at Stanford University. This support will take place during the Spring and Summer Quarters of 2012-13 as well as the Autumn Quarter of…
2012-10-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Sickness Unto Digital
Stanley Fish was here at Stanford recently, for a talk entitled “If You Count It, They Will Come” where he proceeded to count the dangers of the digital humanities–something familiar to those that have read his New York Times column. I’m…
2012-10-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
ORBIS in JDH
The Journal of Digital Humanities came out with Vol. 1 No. 3 today, which includes three articles about ORBIS. Two of these are written by Karl Grossner and myself, and consist of an introduction to ORBIS and an examination of ORBIS and…
2012-09-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a job at Stanford
Stanford has been hiring digital humanists for some time now, though only occasionally by name. It’s currently looking for another, though the title is technically Academic Technology Specialist for History. I’ve heard some trepidation…
2012-09-20Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
On blogging
Criticism of blogging is nothing new. As a self-published platform, the medium itself connotes a lack of standards, editorial control, or peer review. And, while it makes sense to maintain a blog when one is outside an industry that…
2012-09-12Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Accessing Data
The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted an interactive network diagram of institutions. The data is based on the reports given to the Department of Education indicating a list of peer institutions for each university. It’s an…
2012-08-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
A few networks
Documents–in this case aggregated based on city–connected to topics based on the strength of representation of that topic in that document (or in this case, meta-document, since its a collection of documents tagged with a city…
2012-08-17Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Topicography
The topography of a corpus, as represented with topic modeling to produce 100 topic…
2012-08-15Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Using Word Clouds for Topic Modeling Results
A year ago, I painstakingly formatted the topic modeling results from MALLET so that I could paste them, one by one, into Wordle. I was happy with the results, if not the…
2012-08-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Finish my PhD in 13 months?
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln, not content with stealing Matt Jockers from Stanford, is hiring more Digital Humanities…
2012-08-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Thermal Conductivity of Tungsten is an Argument
We all have our favorite pieces of information visualization, and many have been presented by Edward Tufte, but I prefer this more than any other, and more for the content than the representation. For those unfamiliar with Tufte’s The…
2012-08-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
My Information… Not Quite That Beautiful
The Information is Beautiful Awards has released their shortlist. Though none of my own entries made it onto the short list, it is not surprising given the quality of work they were up…
2012-07-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Pragmatism, Practicality, and the Anti-Sublime
Imagine an interactive JavaScript globe. It could take many forms. This one is built in D3, based off Mike Bostock’s excellent example and, like most interesting JavaScript visualization, runs smoothly in Chrome and Safari and poorly in…
2012-07-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
A Map to Nowhere
While the United Kingdom is the most dense region from a global scale, on closer examination it would seem that there is a sort of Hadrian's Firewall as far as Wikipedia is…
2012-07-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Some of My Information is Beautiful!
I submitted six pieces to the Information is Beautiful Awards, which is a contest for data visualization and information graphics. Of those six, I’m proud to be able to say that three of my pieces are in just-announced Long List for their…
2012-07-24Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
An Unsatisfying Intro to D3.js
Last week I had the opportunity to give a short introduction to the JavaScript information visualization library D3. The intro, which took place at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) here at Stanford, was directed at an…
2012-07-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Humanities CMS
It’s a good time to be humanities scholar in need of a complex content management system. While WordPress in all its convenience and glory will always be there for the writer who simply wants to write and publish digitally, there are more…
2012-06-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
How the UVA Crisis Can Help Us Break Out of the Upgrade Path
This year’s eyeo festival focused not on beautiful information, or on amazing new visualization libraries, or data transformation techniques, but rather, as Megan Miller put it, on failure and slow data. That’s horrible, isn’t it? It’s…
2012-06-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Introducing ORBIS|via
The following also appears in the Applying page of…
2012-06-09Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Population Intensification, Agricultural Intensification, Ecological Degradation, the Game
Looking back over some old notes of mine, I was reminded that I made this game in Flash three years…
2012-05-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
CC-BY for Icons?!?!
I'd like to take a moment to thank the several dozen people who helped make this possible by drawing…
2012-05-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Catastrophic Success
There have been a few times over the last two weeks when I thought traffic to ORBIS was finally leveling off. The novelty factor of the work is high–there are very few Imperial Roman Mapquests, or Google Maps for Rome, or Ancient Roman…
2012-05-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
What a bunch of nerds!
There’s a lovely piece on ORBIS at Ars Technica causing what is, for a digital humanities project, quite a bit of…
2012-05-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Metrics of Success
After two weeks, ORBIS has received over 36,000 visitors, with 4000 return visitors and over 45,000 route queries to the map. People are downloading the traditional PDF version of the article, as well as CSVs and KMLs of their routes. Even…
2012-05-09Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
A Week’s Worth of Travel in the Roman World
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World has been up and running for a week now and the response has been simply incredible. While we all expected it to be well-received, especially among the particular scholarly…
2012-05-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
My Definition of Topic Modeling
Understanding topic modeling is, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, “the war that never ends”. And as I was re-reading the excellent posts by Matt Jockers, Scott Weingart and Ted Underwood, I realized that I may never have made clear…
2012-05-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Announcing ORBIS
Those of you who are regular readers will know that I’ve been working on Roman transportation networks since last July. It is my pleasure to announce the results of that work: the release of ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of…
2012-05-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
May 2nd ORBIS Slides
My slides for the talk I’m giving…
2012-04-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Dynamic Distance Cartogram in D3
One of the features of ORBIS that I’ll be demonstrating next Wednesday is this dynamic distance cartogram, which is on Github as a gist and can be seen using bl.ocks here. It’s been written in D3 and uses a few pre-generated cost paths…
2012-04-24Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
A Visual Representation of Stress
It would be useful for network representation to embed within the representation of edges some visual cue as to whether the edges are longer or shorter based on strength of connection as opposed to other reasons (strength of repulsion,…
2012-04-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Review: Tice and Steiner’s Vasi Map
Tice, James, Erik Steiner and Allan Ceen. “Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome.” University of Oregon.…
2012-04-20Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Curmudgeon Club
My post tying digital humanities to The New Aesthetic caused a bit of consternation, and forced me to take a closer look at the movement. Matthew Battles gives the best overview that I’ve read so far, and reminds me of my own sense that…
2012-04-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Sometimes, you’ve just got to laugh
…
2012-04-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Isophoretric Maps
Isochrone maps are well-known enough to have their own Wikipedia page and Google Maps API tutorial. These represent the time to get to or from locations as a gradient and/or contour. Their usefulness in representing historical movement is…
2012-04-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Part of the New Aesthetic
When Ian Bogost and Mike Migurski both mention the same term in close chronological proximity, I feel the need to pay attention. Of course, the one thinks it’s more fodder for taking seriously the personhood of objects (so much so that my…
2012-04-15Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
A Model of and for Digital Publication
A map of expense contours developed from the ORBIS model. Each contour line denotes the cost to deliver goods to…
2012-04-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Building Blocks of a Visual Vocabulary
When I suggested an animated encyclopedia of verbs and processes, I naively assumed that nouns were taken care of. Not so, as The Noun Project demonstrates. The site, which began with the question, “what if I had a sketch for every single…
2012-04-05Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Journal (of)
The inaugural edition of the Journal of the Digital Humanities is now online, and includes an article by me in the Conversations section titled Digital Humanities as…
2012-04-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Watercolor Basemap
Stamen Design, who has done too many beautiful geospatial things for me to count, has created something I’ve been wanting for years. It’s a web basemap in…
2012-03-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
My Day of DH – Pernicious Collaboration
I took part in the Day of DH yesterday, though not as vigorously as I did last year. Here is the Day of Elijah Meeks, in case you’re really, really interested. The post of mine I thought the most valuable is reprinted below, but here with…
2012-03-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Slideshow
This morning I gave a presentation on the role of data visualization in DH work. The annotated slides can be found on Google Docs…
2012-03-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Building a Scholarly Digital Object
I’ve been exposed to a lot of exciting digital humanities research since I came to Stanford, both in the formal projects I’ve been brought in on to support and in consultation with and exposure to ongoing research by various individual…
2012-03-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Topography Error: Too Much Topography!
An attempt to illustrate something that may be better expressed through a less traditional…
2012-03-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Parallel Edges in pgRouting
If, like me, you neglected to check and see if pgRouting (the pathfinding library for PostGIS) handles parallel edges in its default shortest path query, then you’ve likely found out that it doesn’t. You can tell that something is wrong…
2012-03-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Network Visualization Gallery
I’d forgotten just how fun Gephi is. A few exploratory examples…
2012-03-01Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Comparing Geographic Visualizations to Network Visualizations
With March having arrived, it’s time for me to pivot away from Imperial Roman networks and toward new projects. This means stepping away from purely geographic networks and back into more abstract networks, specifically the networks made…
2012-02-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Models as Product, Process and Publication
Possible paths of some historically attested Roman sea routes, constrained by monthly variation in wave…
2012-02-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Adventures in Georectification – Mobile Edition
While attempting to reconstruct the road from Mounesis to Coptos, I found the need to place a Barrington Atlas map into GIS. Naturally, the solution was to take a photograph with it from my phone and email it to myself and georectify it…
2012-02-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Infoviz and New Literacies
Melissa Terras’ recent visual summary of the Digital Humanities has brought attention to the growing vibrancy (and budgets) of the DH community. It also feeds the cycle of debate about the efficacy, role and usefulness of visual display of…
2012-01-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Why I Stopped Coding in Flash and Learned to Love the Bomb
I thought Steve Jobs was dead wrong when he condemned Flash back in April of 2010. The first interesting code I wrote was in Actionscript 3, which I found efficient and remarkably easy to use. Where JavaScript maps and information…
2012-01-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Drupal for Humanists
Quinn Dombrowski and I are writing a manual on using the Drupal 7 CMS for digital humanities projects. Titled unimaginatively Drupal for Humanists, it is meant to provide first an understanding of how to install and configure Drupal and…
2012-01-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Growth Industry
I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to announce that Karl Grossner has joined me here at Stanford as the new Digital Humanities Developer. Karl holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2010),…
2012-01-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Infographic
Melissa Terras has produced this excellent (and very long) summation of current interest and activity in the Digital…
2012-01-15Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Geographic Networks: Getting Started with pgRouting in PostGIS
I’ve been working a lot with pgRouting in PostGIS lately. While the work I was doing with geographic networks originally used general purpose network analysis tools like Gephi, I’ve moved the entire Roman transportation network into a…
2012-01-01Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
A Year in Review
Images uploaded to this site, by month, using an automatic collage…
2012Read here
Journal of Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities as Thunderdome
A revised journal version of the essay on tools, interpretive authority, and the relationship between humanists and software developers.
2012Read here
Journal of Digital Humanities
Modeling Networks and Scholarship with ORBIS
How ORBIS models function as scholarly arguments, teaching resources, and interactive publications.
Elijah Meeks & Karl Grossner
2012Read here
Journal of Digital Humanities
ORBIS: An Interactive Scholarly Work on the Roman World
Introducing ORBIS as a hybrid of historical archive, transportation model, visualization tool, and scholarly argument.
Elijah Meeks & Karl Grossner
2011-12-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Value of Network Visualization
I’ve grown quite familiar with the argument that network visualization, especially the kind of large-scale network visualization that can be popped out almost like an assembly-line product, is pretty but uninstructive. Like anyone who…
2011-12-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
TV Tropes Pt. 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn
Part 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet Part 2: Trope (but not Troper) Communities Example of Thematic…
2011-12-22Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
TVTropes Pt 2: Trope (But Not Troper) Communities
Part 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet Part 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn Example of Thematic…
2011-12-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
TVTropes Pt 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet
Part 2: Trope (but not Troper) Communities Part 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn Example of Thematic…
2011-12-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Adventures in Modularity
I’ve been more engaged with community detection in networks lately. Community detection, what’s listed as the Modularity option in Gephi’s statistics toolbox and referred to as such in the literature, relies on a variety of methods to try…
2011-12-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Book DNA Slides Posted
Matt Jockers posted the slides of our recent talk, which include some explanation of how similarity is…
2011-12-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
More Networks in the Humanities or Did books have DNA?
Fortunately, that was a question left to Matt Jockers. I thought, though, that I might post the slides I used to describe networks in general and the examples using network analysis and representation based on the literature network that…
2011-12-05Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Uncertainty of Influence: Do Books Have DNA?
Today, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, as part of the Visualizing Uncertainty workshop that Nicole Coleman has organized, I’ll be presenting on using network analysis and visualization in the analysis of…
2011-12-03Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Marriage of Standards and Access: Centralized Services as a Tool for Collaboration, Publication and Curation
Today at the HASTAC V conference, I’ll be demoing the spatially-enabled Drupal sites I’ve been developing here at Stanford and the Geoserver+PostGIS backend that these sites point to. I’m going to post the text and images from the…
2011-12-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
HASTAC V: The Search for More Digital Humanities
I’m here at the HASTAC conference at the beautiful and only slightly snowy University of Michigan, where Dan Atkins has explained how cyberinfrastructure works from the e-science perspective. He notes that the NSF can’t fund “humanist”…
2011-11-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Post Your Graphs with gexf-js
While tools like Gephi allow for easy manipulation and examination of a network, to present such networks you’ll invariably need to export it into a more accessible form. This can be accomplished using vector imagery, such as PDF; or…
2011-11-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Negotiating the Transition from Topology to Topography in Geographic Networks
Networks are particularly well-suited for representing travel between points using routes that require establishment, investment and maintenance, like the roads found in traditional Roman land routes. The structure breaks down, though,…
2011-11-17Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Comparing Population Density and Wikipedia Density on GIS Day
One of the responses I’ve heard to the Wikipedia Map in the last post is that it tracks to population density, so I grabbed a population density map from SEDAC and created a few comparative maps at similar scales to…
2011-11-15Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Mapping Wikipedia: Geolocated Articles as a Proxy of Culture and Attention
You can see further maps examining the relationship between population density and Wikipedia article density…
2011-11-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Too Pretty to Pass Up
A chart of network closeness over time, colored by weighted out-degree (toward blue indicating more, toward red indicating less), showing that outgoing connections correlate inversely with closeness. And simply lovely, to…
2011-11-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualization of Network Distance
I’ve just finished my first Gephi plugin, which distorts a geographically laid out network to emphasize network distance. The NBM can be found here and the source code is on GitHub. The layout takes the XY coordinates of the node and…
2011-11-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Scripted Network Animation, the Ugly Years
I’m a step closer to releasing the code to build network animations using the Gephi Toolkit. This video, while much uglier than my earlier ones, is distinguished in that every change to the running layout is set up through cues such that…
2011-11-05Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Thunderdome
Dan Cohen’s newly relaunched Digital Humanities Now is a great place to get the pulse of the DH community. One of the pieces I found there was Natalia Cecire’s When DH Was in Vogue; or, THATCamp Theory. Cecire, who is a managing editor of…
2011-10-29Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Animating Networks in Gephi
I thought I’d give a brief overview of the process I’ve been using to build the Gephi network animations I’ve been posting recently. It’s pretty crude, right now–basically you just run a layout or transformation for a single tick and then…
2011-10-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Google Networks
Google just announced Ripples,which allows Google+ users to visualize the spread of information across the network. Scott Weingart gets into some of the details here and references my G+ post on the matter, where I make two…
2011-10-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Yet Another Gephi Workshop
In my ongoing effort to make sure that everyone in the known world is capable of drawing the most aesthetically pleasing circles with lines connecting them, I’ll be holding another Intro to Gephi workshop at Stanford University in Meyer…
2011-10-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Call for Digital Humanities Project Proposals at Stanford
I’m pleased to announce that we’re now accepting proposals for new Digital Humanities projects starting in Winter 2012. Humanities faculty and graduate students at Stanford are invited to review the proposal guidelines and submit a…
2011-10-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
THATCamp Results
This network was built from the Google Spreadsheet edge list built during the Gephi Workshop at…
2011-10-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
THATCamp SF Gephi Workshop
UPDATE: Here’s a Google Spreadheet to build a sample edge list, add the company/university you’re affiliated with and a few people you know that are at today’s…
2011-10-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Networks in the Humanities, a Visual Exploration
I’m not very good at keeping a secret, especially when I have draft after draft of Skittles-colored networks to show off, but I tried my best this time to keep this process under my hat until I had something to show off. The video below…
2011-10-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Framing Digital Scholarly Communication at HASTAC V
Just a quick note that I’ll be attending the 2011 HASTAC International Conference on December 1st through the 3rd in Ann Arbor, where I’ll be demoing a Drupal-based, Geoserver+PostGIS-backed solution for collaborative production and…
2011-10-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Killer Feature of QGIS
I’ve been working just a bit more with Quantum GIS, the open-source alternative to ESRI’s ArcGIS. At Stanford, we have an unlimited (or practically unlimited, I can never remember) set of licenses for ArcGIS, along with most of the analyst…
2011-10-12Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Everything is a Graph and Drawing It as Such is Always the Best Thing to Do
Well, maybe that’s going a little too far, but Sébastien Heymann has written an excellent response to the Ben Fry quote brought to the fore by Dan Brickley’s recent exploration of literary…
2011-10-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
BADCamp 2011 and THATCamp 2011 Scheduling Conflict
I just noticed a rather disturbing similarity in the marketing material for two upcoming “camps” directed at open-source types who might be involved in technology in the…
2011-10-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Composite
While working on a vector rendition of the Farnese Atlas, a sculpture now residing in Naples that was carved in the 2nd century as a copy of a Greek sculpture possibly dating back to the 2nd century BCE, I realized that the piece wouldn’t…
2011-10-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
What does all this show?
Here’s a detailed and interesting article by Dan Brickley about using Apache Mahout and Gephi to map non-standard networks and use traditional network analysis methods to better understand…
2011-10-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Farnese Atlas Labors Under the Weight of the Imperial Roman Network
…
2011-10-05Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Directed Edge of Space and Reason
Playing with the fabulous layout functions in the new Gephi and an incredible network of literary…
2011-10-01Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Gephi Workshop at Bay Area THATCamp
I’ll be at the upcoming Bay Area THATCamp held at Google’s campus in Mountain View on October 22-23. Along with various unconferencey kinds of things, I’ll be giving a 90-minute tutorial on Gephi, including a showcase of the various new…
2011-09-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
New Features in Gephi .8 Beta
The new version of Gephi that will soon be coming out includes a brand new engine for final output, as well as a host of new features for dynamic graphs and a few other nice additions, such as font options to make your networks look better…
2011-09-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Hacking Networks in the Humanities
Hacking, it seems, is in the air. Dan Cohen has announced the edited version of Hacking the Academy, here at Stanford we’ve finished up with our Humanities Hackerspace experiment, and another Bay Area THATCamp (where I’ll be officially…
2011-09-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
An Ecology of the English Peoples
A river of Stuarts and Plantagenets feeds a lake of Barclays, Darwins and Lennoxes, from which thin streamers of more exotic Wedgwoods, Elliotts and Babingtons do…
2011-09-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualizing Genealogical Networks
Genealogy would seem most amenable to network visualization and analytics, until one realizes just how tangled up certain families can…
2011-09-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Situating Knowledge
Gahegan and Pike's representation of the visible and typically expressed issues (as ovals) along with the implied--and typically difficult to express outside of narrative--issues that also serve to situate a piece of…
2011-08-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Tiered Spatial Services for the Humanities
I have been engrossed in Drupal 7, lately, and it’s a good thing. Stanford has just officially announced the creation of Stanford Web Services, which along with developing and providing robust and sophisticated web services for the campus,…
2011-08-16Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The inarguable legitimacy-providing splendour of goats
Tomorrow I’ll be demoing my Stanford Spatial Drupal distribution for some Stanford folks and David Rumsey. The demo includes an unrectified map of Germany around the Rhine from the 16th century that, shockingly, does not come from Rumsey’s…
2011-08-12Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities Developers Mailing List
While the debate continues as to whether one can “do DH” without coding, my counterpart at UNC, Joseph Ryan, and I thought it would be useful to provide a place for discussion oriented toward Digital Humanities practitioners that tend to…
2011-08-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Legacy
Roberto Busa died on Monday. He was 97. My first exposure to the old Jesuit was the foreword to A Companion to Digital Humanities, where he wrote of the grace of God in the invention of magnetic media. Busa’s “Perspectives on the Digital…
2011-08-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
When Captcha Goes Bad
This is the second bad captcha I’ve had to deal with on the form I’m filling out. Captcha and other methods of assessing the humanity of Internet communication likely have enough material for several PhDs. I think we’d all be better off if…
2011-08-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Twitter, a Good Social Network for Non-Humans
While the shocker headline deals with Newt Gingrich, what’s buried away in PeekYou’s analysis is the disturbing fact that typically only “30-60″ per cent of Twitter Followers in general are real. Coupled with the surprising connectivity…
2011-08-05Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
If You’re Going to San Francisco
As a follow-up to the previous post, here’s a gallery of various representations of San…
2011-08-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Beautiful Maps
Last night, Trulia hosted a small event in San Francisco showcasing beautiful cartography. It included presentations by a host of smart people, including Mike Migurski, whose Modest Maps API has been very good to me, and Julie…
2011-08-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Is there Life on Twitter?
Updated to include a legend, as per advice from Scott…
2011-07-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Finding the Fibonacci Apple
I saw this beautiful examination of the Apple logo via The…
2011-07-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Learning, Design and Technology Expo 2011
Tomorrow is the public exhibition of the final projects for the Learning, Design and Technology program here at Stanford. I’ve been asked to be one of the reviewers of the projects, which include learning games, map-based teaching tools,…
2011-07-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Nine Rivers and a Mountain
That’s what you’ll cross on your way to Rome from Sarajevo. You could stop at Ravenna or Aqvuileia or Interamnio. It is a much more pleasant trip than the overland route from Hippo, where Augustine wrote the City of…
2011-07-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Massaging the Media
Marshall McLuhan would be a very spry 100 by now, and in honor of that centennial, I thought I’d dig up an old tetrad I built, try to explain it in a little more detail, and then focus on what I see as evidence of its…
2011-07-24Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Hidden Legends
A couple of variations on representing biodiversity…
2011-07-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Against Legends
In September, I’ll begin supporting Walter Scheidel in an attempt to help better understand Imperial Roman transportation costs and networks. It’s quite different from the work I’ve been doing these last few months with Ursula…
2011-07-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Hackering
It’s Thursday, which means I’m sitting in the Lit Lab for Hackerspace 2 here at Stanford–an attempt to provide a collaborative environment to share expertise in using digital tools to explore humanities topics. I think of this little…
2011-07-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Rome’s World:A Digital Translation of the Peutinger Table
Four years ago, when I was a graduate student at UC Merced, I presented some of my research exploring the effect of environmental change on state formation in Sandai China using spatial analysis. The conference was a small affair focused…
2011-07-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
THATCamp Bay Area, Pt. 2, Electric Googleoo
October 22-23 will see a new THATCamp hosted by Google. Regardless of one’s feeling about unconferences, the Google Campus is always a nice place to…
2011-07-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Hackerspace
Today is the first attempt at creating a Humanities Hackerspace here at Stanford. I’ll be joining Ryan Heuser, hacker and lab manager for the Literary Lab, and the possibility of more Stanford alt-ac types (like Academic Technology…
2011-07-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Found Patterns
Thus the work that follows is split between two goals. The first is to represent data in such a way that its internal structure reveals itself visually, providing insights that could not be gleaned through textual analysis. The other is to…
2011-07-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Reason with the Grue
Christian Swinehart has quietly produced a beautiful and digitally rich exploration of choose your own adventure (cyoa) books that should serve as a model for the production of digital scholarly media. He begins with a small corpus, only…
2011-07-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Meaningful Research in Google Maps
I had an interesting discussion yesterday with Joseph Kautz, head of Stanford’s Digital Language Lab and Academic Technology Specialist, about creating mobile apps for mapping languages. It made me wonder about how language appears in the…
2011-07-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Topic Networks in Proust
Back in March, Jeff Drouin used my topic network technique and script to build a topic network for Proust. Unlike my own technique-heavy and interpretation-light demonstration of topic networks, though, Jeff actually spends some time…
2011-07-05Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Patterns of State Formation
…
2011-06-30Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Using Spatial Data to Represent and Analyze Attention of Emergent Entities
Border colors correspond to polygon perimeters ranging from black (for the smallest polygons) to red to orange to green to blue for the longest perimeter…
2011-06-29Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Lightning Rod
The recent New York Times story on Franco Moretti’s & Matt Jockers’ Stanford Lit Lab presents two classic criticisms of the Digital Humanities: that it is scientism at worst and, at best, using computers to do what humans can already do.…
2011-06-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The MMORPG Spring?
Massively multiplayer games have seen all manner of recapitulation of real-world emergent phenomena within their simulated realms (sometimes fostered and sometimes entirely unintended). But now, Rock, Paper Shotgun is reporting an on-line…
2011-06-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
DH11 Network Graphs
Just a quick note for anyone that wants to critique, analyze or browse the networks I used to create the DH2011 Network Visualization page. I put the original .gephi project file along with csv, gdf, gexf and graphml versions of the DH11…
2011-06-23Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Culturomics
Erez Aiden and JB Michel just finished their keynote and signaled the end of DH11 (except for a dinner and a few tours of Northern California) and capped off what was, for me, an extremely enjoyable and terribly useful conference. Along…
2011-06-20Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
DH11 Opening Keynote: David Rumsey
I’m happy David Rumsey was asked to open up this year’s Digital Humanities conference because it gave me a chance to personally thank him for making my work, and the work any scholar who needs historical maps from the periods and regions…
2011-06-20Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
DH11 Poster Varient 2
Julia Flanders found my use of the Los Angeles Raiders great, Vincent “Bo” Jackson, to be a poor representation of California. Given her dominant position within the large “Imperial” component of the DH11 network, as well as her excellent…
2011-06-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
DH11 Day 1, Pt. 1, §2: Natural Language Processing
Today I’m taking the popular Natural Language Processing class led by Stanford’s Chris Manning, who refers to the concept as computational exploration of corpora–another way to express Moretti’s distant reading–but also as “shallow…
2011-06-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Authentic California Culture
Tecmo’s US headquarters was in Terrence, CA. The greatest Tecmo Bowl player played for the Los Angeles Raiders. If we must orientalize California, let us move beyond…
2011-06-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities 2011 Day 0
It’s the first pre-conference workshop day for this year’s Digital Humanities conference. I’ll be taking part in the Visualizing Literary History workshop and vigorously protesting the orientalization of California and Californians as…
2011-06-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Mandala Browser
Stan Reucker is now demonstrating the Mandala Browser, which allows me to visualize the usage of “love” and “death” among Juliet, Mercutio and…
2011-06-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualizing Literary History Before Noon
This year’s conference has a tempting selection of workshops and among them is Visualizing Literary History, provided by Susan Brown, Stan Ruecker, Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair–which I’m in the process of attending. The workshop…
2011-06-09Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Drawing Water
I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in a data visualization workshop at the Exploratorium this Saturday and, as part of the amazing collection of inspirational material submitted by the participants, I saw this piece. A work by…
2011-06-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualizing DH11
John Unsworth was good enough to send me the participant list for the upcoming Digital Humanities 2011 Conference and I tried to put together a few interesting visualizations of the participants, sessions and institutions that will make up…
2011-06-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Gephi is like Photoshop for Networks
At least, that’s how the sales pitch goes. I don’t use Photoshop much, so I have no idea if it has the same kind of beautiful data transformation features as Gephi. One of the newest layouts is a simple radial diagram, that can be used to…
2011-06-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Experience with car-painting and tinsmith tasks is a plus.
What If Drivers Were Hired Like…
2011-06-03Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Event Modeling – A Position
I’m getting ready for the Digital Humanities 2011 conference here at Stanford this month and the panel I’m on, Modeling Event-Based Historical Narratives, has decided to build short position papers in preparation for our presentation. I…
2011-05-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities as Infrastructure
Apropos of my recent post on spatial services, I just noticed that DHQ has Patrik Svensson’s latest DH article up, which this time deals with practical and conceptual infrastructure being developed to support…
2011-05-31Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Chance to Show Off
DH11 is coming up soon and, given that I had to take out a second mortgage to pay the registration fee, I’m going to make sure to have a host of beautiful and perhaps even informative visualizations of the work going on here at Stanford as…
2011-05-30Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Twitter Networks
ArXiv (which I only recently discovered while having lunch with the Culturomics folks was pronounced “archive”) has an en excellent study of Twitter using network analysis to reveal that earlier claims for a limit to the number of members…
2011-05-29Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Meaningful Centralized Spatial Services
Lately, I’ve been trying to build a formal continuum of spatial services based on audience, analytical complexity and sustainability to orient scholars and spatial services providers when assessing prospective projects. Too often,…
2011-05-19Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Content
The following is derived from a presentation I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to give to the Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) advisory council on the subject of supporting humanities…
2011-05-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Another Gephi Workshop
I’ll be hosting a second Gephi Workshop at Noisebridge in San Francisco on May 18th at 6:30PM. Space is limited–you can find more details…
2011-05-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Google Reveals Stunning Continental-Wide Failure
Sadly, Google is still incapable of making any headway in the lucrative markets of the Last Continent. Still, as their recently released visualization of Google searches across the globe reveals, they’re doing all right in the rest of the…
2011-04-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Drupal Finally Got Me
I never wanted to be a webmaster and always thought the term was hokey. I started developing in Flash because of its emphasis on vector graphics rather than its web portability and avoided Javascript because every time I looked into it I…
2011-04-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Open Source Fetish
Richard Stallman stopped by and gave a talk at the Stanford Law School yesterday where I tried, with the financial support of some of my compatriots–unsuccessfully–to buy his stuffed gnu. He gave what has become the typical RMS talk on the…
2011-04-09Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Ursula Heise Named 2011 Guggenheim Fellow
Congratulations to Ursula on her being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to further pursue Cultures of extinction: narrative, database, and biodiversity loss. I’ve been working closely with her these last few months in an attempt to compress…
2011-04-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Echoes at AAS
Despite my earlier negativity, there was some digital at the AAS conference in Honolulu after all. Interspersed with the classic close reading of historical texts filed away in various archives, I saw a few hints at how digital objects…
2011-04-01Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Marginal Sub-Field
Here I am in Honolulu at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, where I will be presenting on Day 5, the last day, during the final set of presentations, as part of the only panel mentioning the Digital Humanities, “Digital…
2011-03-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The TED Talk Fetish
On Wednesday I gave a two-hour workshop on using Gephi. I had hoped to get into the more exotic aspects of the software, including dynamic networks and using sub-filters, but I barely had enough time to demonstrate how to set it up and…
2011-03-22Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Maps, Graphs and Workshops
In preparation for tomorrow’s Introduction to Gephi Workshop, I’ve put up a PDF of the short presentation up. The full workshop will focus on hands-on use of Gephi with examples of spigots and filters and analytics and all the rest of the…
2011-03-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Day
Today is the 3rd Annual Day of the Digital Humanities, where DH practitioners describe a typical day in the community. Along with myself, Matt Jockers, Glen Worthey, Ben Albritton and Jon Christensen and Susan Rojo are all representing…
2011-03-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualization
Below are a few images I created in Gephi that I’m posting here so as to give me an opportunity to conveniently show them off today. Much of this has to do with a current project with Dr. Ursula Heise focused on database aesthetics,…
2011-03-12Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Authorial London, the Poetry Foundation and Posters
I suppose I’ve been remiss in pointing out a few things that have happened recently in relation to the work I’ve been doing. The first, and least important, is the creation of a couple Cafepress posters based on the Digital Humanities…
2011-03-04Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as the Golden Age of Software
It seems Thursdays are database days in the digital humanities, as along with Ben Schmidt’s excellent look at building performant databases for humanities research, Sean Takats of Zotero has just posted an extremely informative exploration…
2011-03-03Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Database Literacy
Benjamin Schmidt at Princeton has written an excellent description of databases in digital humanities research. Along with outlining how databases work in the mediation of humanities knowledge, he also highlights the need for data literacy…
2011-03-01Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Civil Unrest in the Middle East, 2400 Wikipedians through 10,000 Edits
An animated visualization of edits to Wikipedia pages from December 1st to February 20th, focused on the pages relating to the civil unrest in the Middle East as well as the country pages where that unrest was…
2011-02-20Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualizing the 2011 Middle-East Protests
This is a visualization of Wikipedia activity from December to yesterday, split into distinct time periods by color (running from lighter to darker through the time…
2011-02-18Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Topic Network
With the help of MALLET and Gephi, I walked through the process of creating topic networks and dealt a bit with their possible uses. For my corpus, I focused on papers, chapters, blog posts and collaborative works that grapple with the…
2011-02-15Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Vizblog Article on Mapping Digital Humanities Collaboration
My article at Viz., “Mapping and Problematizing Digital Humanities Collaboration” is up. My favorite visual from the article sums up the “problematizing”…
2011-02-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
DH11 Tweeterpation
#dh11isntverydh is currently trending as my favorite Twitter…
2011-02-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Topic Networks
I’m in the middle of a rather large analysis of topic networks created using topic modeling and visualized in Gephi, of course, and simply can’t resist posting a few samples, because they’re absolutely…
2011-02-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities as Bi-Partisan Bogeyman
I find it depressing that so many responding to this article, despite apparently believing that they were the last people to receive real exposure to humanistic knowledge, have such a sour, parsimonious and uncharitable view of the proper…
2011-02-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Stanford Digital Humanities Brown Bag
Every second Wednesday, the Stanford Humanities Center hosts a DH brown bag so that interested scholars, staff and students can discuss their latest projects and just get the pulse of the DH community at…
2011-02-01Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Waiting for Godot, the Video Game
Updated to add: Zach Chandler just noted something of the reverse of what I describe below in that game designers are also looking to humanists. As he…
2011-01-28Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visualizing Databases
I’ve become quite the fan of Gephi, lately, and received a good-natured challenge by one of my colleagues, which went something like, “Why is a everything a network with you, now?” Obviously, in the case of social network-like phenomena,…
2011-01-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
News From the Front
MALLET, from UMASS-Amherst, breaking down the narrative bits in a very large database into 50 topics, with Gephi visualizing the network of connections between topics and subjects from an an earlier processing of the same database, but…
2011-01-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Ecosystem
I had the opportunity to present the DH@Stanford graph to my colleagues, yesterday, during our monthly Digital Humanities roundtable, where along with spirited discussion I met Katja Zelljadt, the incoming director of the Stanford…
2011-01-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Old Projects and New in the DH@Stanford Graph
I’ve started receiving more and more help with describing the Digital Humanities landscape here at Stanford, and so I suppose it’s time to update the DH@Stanford…
2010-12-22Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
An Interview with Tarn Adams
This is a repost of my interview with Tarn Adams, creator of Dwarf Fortress, a quirky and absurdly complex game that inspires enormous devotion among its fans–one of the most interesting examples of which is Matul Remrit, a collaboration…
2010-12-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Testing out Flash on an iPad
Stanford is closed for the end of the year, and so during that time I’m going to repost some (slightly amended) material that I posted elsewhere (such as at HASTAC during my time as a HASTAC scholar). Here is a short bit from Summer 2010…
2010-12-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as the Upgrade Path
It’s the end of the year, and it’s time to cycle out the old, staid DHS background for a new, hip background image. Old 2010 was represented by this…
2010-12-12Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Mapping Critical Infrastructure Detailed in Wikileaks Cable
Again, the ease of use of Google Maps has allowed for a quick and dirty spatial visualization, in this case the folks at floatingsheep.org have mapped and done some analysis of the Wikileaks cable detailing global infrastructure vital to…
2010-12-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Chinese Civilization in Time and Space
Fan I Chun was here at Stanford yesterday, visiting from Academica Sinica where he’s busy developing GIS datasets for China based on aerial photos, historical maps, gazetteers and atlases. Stanford has had authorized access to the Chinese…
2010-12-09Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Protesters Using Digital Mapping Tools
The protests against tuition hikes in London today are leveraging Google Maps to track official response (and Godzilla, apparently). I’m not a fan of Google Maps or the entire Google Geo Ecosystem, but the ability to quickly create and…
2010-12-09Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Wikileaks Graph
The Wikileaks Saga continues, and now the Internet group Anonymous–which originated as a self-organized campaign against The Church of Scientology and matured (some say splintered) into a rights-oriented hacktivist group with the rise of…
2010-12-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Cathy Davidson Nominated to sit on the National Council of the Humanities
In a press release yesterday, the White House announced the nomination of Cathy Davidson as member of the National Council of the Humanities, which advises the NEH Chair. At Duke, Cathy has long been a proponent of integrating digital…
2010-12-06Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Spatiality and Slavery
On Friday I had the opportunity to sit in on Zephyr Frank’s presentation for the Virtual Cities/Digital Histories symposium. His work, Terrain of History: Spatial History of Rio de Janeiro, 1840s-1930s, continues to produce beautiful…
2010-12-03Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Interview with Andrew Hussie, Creator of Homestuck
I recently interviewed Andrew Hussie, the creator of Problem Sleuth and Homestuck at MS Paint Adventures. In my continuing belief that digital humanities scholars can learn practical and theoretical lessons from avant garde digital…
2010-12-03Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Hydra
Wikileaks.org was shut down late last night or early this morning, and already a host of services and sites have rushed into the gap to provide access to the existing dataset of leaked material. It is all a very interesting phenomenon that…
2010-12-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Opera Collaborations in the Early 18th Century
This is a small piece of a larger dataset of operas, their composers, librettists, theatres of performance and dedicatees from the 17th and early 18th century. As I was sifting through the modules identified by network analysis, I came…
2010-11-30Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Networks and Perspective
I’ve been digging into Alexis Jacomyal’s new network graph viewer SiGMa, which is still in development but the source is available at github. One of the features he’s developing is a fisheye viewer, which is fun and frustrating and affords…
2010-11-29Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Wikileaks, Wikipedia and Fractures
Wikileaks has begun another large-scale dump of classified material, prompting a tweet from Larry Sanger, academic and co-founder of…
2010-11-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Pirate Bay, Copyright and Tradition
Copying is not theft, and we intuit that when we see those silly commercials comparing downloading movies to stealing cars. Of course, it begs the question of whether or not file-sharing and copyright infringement cause damage despite not…
2010-11-22Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities in the New York Times
A piece in last week’s New York Times explores the growth of data-oriented research in the…
2010-11-01Read here
SevenLions
The Emersonian Transcendentalism of the Insane Clown Posse
And other papers that I would write if I had the time and…
2010-10-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Walking through networks with GexfWalker
Thanks to Alexis Jacomy’s La Carte du Tendre du Web, you can easily embed a traversable version of your network on any website, inside any blog post or wherever you’d like. GexfWalker, as the software is known, operates off of a .gexf…
2010-10-25Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Updated DH@Stanford Thematic Graphs
The project-oriented and person-oriented graphs of the most updated dataset of the Digital Humanities network at Stanford are up on the Digital Humanities at Stanford page. I played with some of the different algorithms, which made them…
2010-10-22Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Update to the Stanford DH Network Map
I won’t have a chance to give various formulations on it until next week, but the new map with the addition of the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab, the AIMS Project and the Stanford Natural Language Processing Lab can be seen…
2010-10-21Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Robert Creeley E-Mail Correspodence Network
An early draft of poet Robert Creeley’s email correspondence network, emphasizing the connection between the poet and Gerard Malanga. The ~50,000 item correspondence is being processed by the AIMS Project here at Stanford, which focuses on…
2010-10-20Read here
SevenLions
George W. Bush, the Texas Rangers and the Future of America
The United States of America – Founded in 1776 – was managed by George W. Bush from 2000-2008. The Texas Rangers, founded in 1961, was managed by the same man from 1989 to 1998. Given that Dubya’s managerial stint took place 224 years…
2010-10-13Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as a Network Map
To facilitate discussion of metrics, definition and suitability, I’ve added a new page focused on visualizing and analyzing the Digital Humanities network at Stanford. I found at THATCamp and here at Stanford that this can cause agitation…
2010-10-12Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanities as XKCD Community Map
Something tells me that Glen Worthey’s desired map of the Digital Humanities would look more like…
2010-10-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Multiscale Apps
With Apple’s retreat from their position disallowing the development of iDevice apps using Adobe AIR–fundamentally the same technology used in Flash on the Web–and the growth in Flash-supported mobile devices, the much-heralded and by many…
2010-10-10Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as THATCamp
THATCamp SF is going on this weekend, and the self-organizing, hands-on event provided quality both of discussion and participant. Glen Worthey suggested a session on mapping the Digital Humanities which devolved, due in no small part to…
2010-10-07Read here
SevenLions
MacBook Pro Cancels Benchmark: Interrupted by Flaming Hot Magma
Dammit, I just lost a piece of my life on MS Paint Adventures… And for…
2010-09-29Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Humanities Networks in Gephi, pt. III
A few last easy visualizations, before I move on to different datasets and methodologies. First, as close to an informative visualization of Voltaire and his correspondents as I can…
2010-09-27Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
More Voltaire Graph Visualization
The interesting problem when dealing with such a large dataset with little depth (the data as it is collated in these examples is focused on number of connections rather than quality, as individual letters are held as connecting two people…
2010-09-27Read here
SevenLions
Stuxnet: Could the Cure be as Dangerous as the Disease?
Stuxnet seems to be a warvirus, and it seems to be finished. But if I was in charge of the systems running a major site considered critically important, I’d make certain that when I installed the hotfixes and cleaned the system that the…
2010-09-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Graph Visualization of Voltaire’s Network
Gephi continues to impress me with its ability to arrange and represent large amounts of graph data. Voltaire, with his nearly 20,000 letters sent and received, is in red. His most numerous correspondents are in blue and the various…
2010-09-24Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Humanities Graphs Using Gephi
The network visualization tool Gephi, which recently received recognition from Oracle as an exemplary Java project, provides an enormously powerful toolbox for visualizing and analyzing network data such as the kind found in the new…
2010-09-20Read here
SevenLions
Ah the unscrupulous mule! It understands war.
Millions of books lining the shelves at Borders and stacking up in Googlespace and literature moves…
2010-09-20Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Historical Georectification: The Seductive Power of Ducks
Edward Tufte referred to one form of visual junk as “ducks”, in reference to a house built like a giant duck, criticizing the superfluity of it with a quote from Robert Venturi that ends with the…
2010-09-14Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
The Digital Humanities as Imagined Community
On September 28th, from noon to 5PM, I’ll be taking part in the SULAIR Open House, where I’ll show off a few tools and analyses I put together for the “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project in an attempt to explain what I do as a…
2010-09-11Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
When the mouse was in my hand, the cigarette flew away
The Digital Humanities is a big tent, and includes analysis of how digital communication has affected traditional society. I couldn’t help thinking about this as I was watching one of my favorite actors, Shammi Kapoor, in the process of…
2010-09-10Read here
SevenLions
Google Wave as Yo Dawg
Elsewhere at my workaday life, I went on and on about the digital humanities relates to how Google canned Wave. Here’s the…
2010-09-08Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
What the Digital Humanities needs to learn from Google Wave
The Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH just released a new study analyzing the efficacy of their Digital Humanities grant program. The response of SUG recipients was uniformly positive and they described the program as “hugely…
2010-09-07Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Visual Programming
Inkscape released a new version of it’s excellent SVG editor on August 23rd and it continues, in my mind, to be the most intuitive and useful visualization tool available. It’s invariably the fist thing I use when approaching a new topic…
2010-09-02Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Amusing Features of Historical Maps
Historical maps provide us with a cloudy window into the past. Sometimes, what you see through that window is silly. Below is the legend from A. Keith Johnston’s 1854 Moral & statistical chart showing the geographical distribution of man…
2010-08-26Read here
Digital Humanities Specialist
Peer Review of Undergraduate Spatial History Projects
I was fortunate enough to be asked by the Spatial History Project to take part in the review of undergraduate summer projects. The particular paper and interactive visualization that I reviewed was “Building the New Order: 1938-1945″, an…
2010-08-17Read here
SevenLions
And so we come full circle
“Dwarf Fortress is really the kind of game that benefits third party viewers most when it’s transcribed and narrated and illustrated, rather than just…
2010-08-12Read here
SevenLions
The Storyteller as Parser: Interactive Fiction as Community Medium
You’d imagine that, at some point, when all things approach infinity, we’ll be able to link Utah Phillips with Zork. The former, a storyteller and a wobbly, seems at least categorically dissimilar enough from the latter, the ur-Interactive…
2010-07-21Read here
SevenLions
iGuilt
Pulitzer Prize-winner and App Store Censoree Mark Fiore explaining the hidden costs of your latest status…
2010-06-05Read here
SevenLions
But… Doesn’t Google own Youtube?
So, I’m trying to get an episode of ST:TOS on Youtube and the rights-management requires an upgraded Flash Player on this laptop and that borks Firefox for some reason, so I figure I’ll give Chrome a try because it just happens to be built…
2010-06-04Read here
SevenLions
Testing out Flash on an iPad
Fellow Stanford digital type Carlos Seligo and I checking out the usability of Flash on an iPad by running a remote client and hosting the Flash app on a nearby MacBook. This was an impromptu investigation, and so I apologize for not…
2010-06-02Read here
SevenLions
We tend towards influential, fractional exemplars, pa...
We tend towards influential, fractional exemplars, partly out of necessity (raised to the level of institutions) and partly out of habit (raised to the level of…
2010-05-14Read here
SevenLions
Frank Frazetta Died
I grew up with Frazetta’s vision of John Carter and Barsoom. As a child, I associated Frazetta’s work with photography and it was a real shock for me to realize that some human being had painted those…
2010-05-11Read here
SevenLions
Tarn Adams Interview Up on HASTAC
My interview with Dwarf Fortress developer Tarn Adams is up on HASTAC. I tried to craft a series of questions that would allow Tarn to discuss issues important to various Digital Humanities scholars, and not just a maps-and-games kind of…
2010-04-30Read here
SevenLions
Top Ten New Features of HTML5
Now that Steve Jobs has firmly stated that Flash can be buried because rich internet applications can be written in “javascript” (a new and exciting “scripted” language that little is known about, except for the fact that Lowes.com has a…
2010-04-27Read here
SevenLions
Cellar door, oleomargarine; oleomargarine, cellar door
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 9:20 AM and is filed under Art, Buckeye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently…
2010-04-27Read here
SevenLions
MacBook Pro Cancels Benchmark: Interrupted by Flaming Hot Magma
The folks at PCAuthority discovered something we already knew: Dwarf Fortress is for serious performance testing. Apparently, they used the WorldGen feature of everyone’s favorite roguelike fantasy world simulator to turn the i7 MacBook…
2010-04-21Read here
SevenLions
Commons-Based Peer Collaborative Pixel Pushing
Playpen allows you to draw some extremely pixelated Harkonnens, but it does have Dwarf Fortress. Don’t try to rescue the beard mite, though, it’s a lost…
2010-04-19Read here
SevenLions
Impossible Super Mario Opera
It's absolutely incredible. The timing necessary to pull this off, and the mastery of the gameplay elements… I can't believe it's been around for three years and I've never heard of…
2010-04-14Read here
SevenLions
Apple thinks COBOL is evil, “GOTO 10″ Bullshit
There’s a great post on the entire Adobe-Apple debacle over at /dev/why!?! that not only explains the technical issues at play with Apple’s closing off of the iWhatever to outside SDKs but also points out that this “makes it a license…
2010-04-12Read here
SevenLions
There’s a reason why he won the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by…
2010-04-08Read here
SevenLions
Kill It With Magma
There’s a great interview with Tarn Adams up on Negative Gamer. Tarn and his brother are creating Dwarf Fortress, as inexplicable as it is marvelous. How marvelous and inexplicable and crazy? Well, if Baudrillard was writing Simulacra and…
2010-04-08Read here
SevenLions
This is why we can’t have nice things
The more I code, the more I think coding is for tools. For tools, by tools, to keep all the power in the hands of the needy pedants that have the time and delusion to keep track of the absolute normative disaster that are programming…
2010-04-05Read here
SevenLions
The Transcendent Beauty of Radar Topography
Some days, when you’re working with spatial analytical software, looking for a way to shoehorn techniques used to study bighorn sheep into studying the historic gravities of power, you forget that you’re dealing with some of the most…
2010-04-02Read here
SevenLions
And Sometimes the Internet Scares the Hell Out of You
Guess What 14-legged Monster Just Got a Taste for Humans - Be…
2010-03-31Read here
SevenLions
Next Week, AD
For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I…
2010-03-31Read here
SevenLions
Sometimes you find the funniest things on the Internet
It’s also aware to me she might (I don’t know because it’s a personal issue) be a femenist. Nothing really wrong with that. But sooner or later even femenist have to face…
2010-03-31Read here
SevenLions
Tomorrow, AD
For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I…
2010-03-24Read here
SevenLions
Articulate synesthetic audiovision
Boing Boing has an excellent essay by the Superbrothers about the strength and promise of gaming as a form of communication. They even take on the…
2010-03-22Read here
SevenLions
Visualizing Spatial History
We’re all spoiled by cartoon maps of the allies storming Normandy or the melting ice caps, and so a visualization of spatial change in medieval China, while accurate (at least according to the Songshi, Taiping huanyu ji & Yuanfeng jiuyu…
2010-03-17Read here
SevenLions
Simplicity is Force
It wouldn’t be hyperbole to call this one of the most amazingly sung and choreographed pieces ever…
2010-03-13Read here
SevenLions
Steve Jobs Says Duracell is Lazy, Energizer’s ‘Keeps going, and going and going’ mantra is “Bullshit”
Or, at least, that’s what I expect to hear soon enough, now that Apple is in the battery…
2010-03-05Read here
SevenLions
Abstract Virtual Game Art
DefaultProperties is not a loop. It is a game modification presenting a perpetual state of expectancy. In its original format (10 were produced on custom computers) we are watching them and they are watching us. Nobody is going…
2010-02-17Read here
SevenLions
Learning Incorrect Schema
Just finished watching Will Wright’s presentation for the Games for Learning Institute. It’s cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will…
2010-02-09Read here
SevenLions
Esoterica
It’s hard to tell if there’s such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they’re right next to each other but, because of how we…
2010-02-08Read here
SevenLions
OSRIC, the Usurper
Against all intuition and spurred by willful nostalgia, I went out and bought the 4th (5th? 18th?) Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. I remember the halcyon days of yore, when I would spend hours of nerdy bliss reading…
2010-02-03Read here
SevenLions
Updated Apple Downloads for Flash Player
I took the liberty of updating Apple.com’s woefully out-of-date description of its Adobe Flash Player for…
2010-02-01Read here
SevenLions
Apple Hates Homestar, Seriously
I had no idea until Stanford got me an iPhone and said “Develop scholarly digital media for mobile devices!” and I said, “Yeah, sure–John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Mobile…
2010-01-15Read here
SevenLions
A Clockwork Canary
There's such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It's not even the writing, it's that people read it and they just accept. Like they're listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because…
2010-01-11Read here
SevenLions
Quest for Glory Fan Art
Not the kind you’re expecting, but rather watercolor interpretations of AGDI’s remake of the classic Sierra On-Line 16-color sequel to the only briefly named Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero. Now, before you scoff, I know the artist…
2009-12-16Read here
SevenLions
Beautiful Prezi
Prezi is a presentation creation package that advertises itself as the living presentation tool. All the cool kids at DAC09 were using it, and it’s particularly appealing because it allows you to embed swf into the presentation, so maybe…
2009-11-18Read here
SevenLions
Son of the Great River Nominated for a Cybil Award
I found out over the weekend that Son of the Great River was one of the nominees for the 2009 Cybils in the Young Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy category. I'll put up a more detailed post later that gives me a better chance to express how…
2009-11-16Read here
SevenLions
The Emergent Majesty of Dwarf Fortress
If . . . . . makes you quiver in your boots, but maybe you're no longer so worried about suffering Yet Another Stupid Death and instead you wish you could get together some friends to assemble a ballista and shoot the damn dragon, then…
2009-10-23Read here
SevenLions
The Visual Display of Knowledge
How would WOPR describe a recession? I suppose a little like this. There are collections of creative visualizations like Data Beautiful and theorists like Edward Tufte from whom we can draw rules for the visual display of information. But…
2009-10-15Read here
SevenLions
We’re Still Far Away From a True Image Search
Years ago I’d mentioned to a friend how someone should create an image search based on images and not on phrases. So I could put in a picture of a Ding Tripod and get all sorts of images that somehow shared visual similarities with Ding…
2009-10-10Read here
SevenLions
Craigslist is Dying?
Unlike the earlier fear that Wikipedia is on the decline, this one seems serious. Outsourcing bogus Craigslist ads is a staple of sites like Rentacoder, and even with Craigslist experimenting with account verification via phone, it doesn’t…
2009-10-09Read here
SevenLions
The Underculture
Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Unknown Troper? Yeah,…
2009-10-06Read here
SevenLions
Bipolar Blogposter!
As a note to my fan(s), I’m going to break the triforce and try to maintain my off-the-wall and primarily socially-oriented, web-enabled posting at Seven Lions while donning the Digital Humanities Guy outfit and posting on the more…
2009-09-11Read here
SevenLions
Wikipedia Propaganda Posters
Rather than use some kind of creative title, with allusions to timeless pieces of art, I decided to go for the lowest-common denominator, because I think people need to spend a little less time talking about Wikipedia and a little more…
2009-09-04Read here
SevenLions
Oh Blog!
You can’t leave anything alone on the Internet for more than three days without it crashing spectacularly. Still, it’s better than…
2009-08-07Read here
SevenLions
Twitter gets DOSed, 4Chan not Responsible?
Twitter was taken down by the last trick known to the "hacker" community. Oh sure, passwords still get stolen and personal information still gets used to humiliate the semi-public figures of the Internet, but it's all done in a remarkably…
2009-08-04Read here
SevenLions
Wikipedia is Dying!!!
A new data set on Wikipedia edits and new article creation is being breathlessly touted as a sign that Wikipedia has reached its peak and is pointed toward inevitable decline. I think the biggest problem with Wikipedia is that it draws out…
2009-07-19Read here
SevenLions
Bad Egg has Value
I'm digging through the Zork source code for mysterious purposes to be revealed later, but I figure I can share some of the more interesting bits with the world at large. I'm one of those people for whom Zork was a seminal childhood…
2009-07-15Read here
SevenLions
Not Content with Fiscal Bankruptcy
California, that teetering, bankrupt, furlough-doling entity that was once the swaggering bully of these United…
2009-07-01Read here
SevenLions
Defining Censorship in the Digital Age
Modern censorship isn't about stopping the flow of information, that would be impossible, it's about making the barriers of access to it so high that users can't easily find it. Censorship (High barriers, privilege-based production…
2009-06-30Read here
SevenLions
Provides 7XP, and Mutton
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 9:20 AM and is filed under Art, Digital Innovation, Epiphenomena. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently…
2009-06-26Read here
SevenLions
The Future of Learning in the Digital Age
tl;dr The university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the…
2009-06-25Read here
SevenLions
The Death of the King of Pop as Digital Phenomena
Thanks to Wikipedia’s tech-blog we can see how Michael Jackson’s death looks from the perspective of server load and…
2009-06-22Read here
SevenLions
Are Internet Activists the Ultimate Paper Tigers?
I recently received an email from my aunt, who works for the International Rescue Committee. She’s in the Sudan, helping people as she’s done for years now. Her work, and the work of people like her, who are willing to place themselves in…
2009-06-21Read here
SevenLions
Google Revolution Beta
Google has released updated kmls with fresh satellite imagery of Tehran, though it’s from June 18th, so it can’t begin the real process of commons-based examination for clues as to what’s going on in Tehran. According to their update,…
2009-06-16Read here
SevenLions
Final Boss of the Internet
Whyweprotest.net, the activist faction of Anonymous, the collective entity that exists as the sort of summa cum laude reductio absurdum of all that Web 1.0 was, is running a secure site for news and communication and distributed denial of…
2009-06-16Read here
SevenLions
Manifest Destiny
Just finished another read-through of the new Digital Humanities Manifesto and it’s interesting to see how the Digital Humanities continues to position itself as an academic, intellectual ally to so many of the progressive movements found…
2009-06-12Read here
SevenLions
A bit of peril
For those of you unaware of Ani DiFranco, she’s the authentic version of Alanis Morissette or, shoot, my musical knowledge fell to pieces during the Y2K disaster and I can’t even make a hip Joan Jett reference because she’s coming back…
2009-06-04Read here
SevenLions
The Phenomenon of the 99¢ eBook
In case you haven’t noticed, there are several thousand free books available for Kindle readers, and many more that cost about as much as a pulp novel did in 1945 and less than a decent pack of gum costs today. Now, there have always been…
2009-05-31Read here
SevenLions
Son of the Great River: Review Roundup
Son of the Great River has been out for two months now and I’m happy to report the reviews have been solidly positive so far. Book reviews get scattered all over the Internet, and it’s a rather maddening trap to start googling yourself and…
2009-05-30Read here
SevenLions
Middle School is Web 3.0
I got to put on my Author Hat and meet with a bunch of 4th, 5th and 6th-graders and discuss the process of writing, the story in Son of the Great River, and numerous other topics, not least of which was Edward Cullen and Stephanie Meyer.…
2009-05-25Read here
SevenLions
Topicality be Damned, Back to Geography!
I keep meaning to write something about poor Jared Diamond’s woes and the shadenfreude that the entire discipline of anthropology is currently feeling. Other topics that should have already been thrown into the giant hopper but…
2009-05-20Read here
SevenLions
Infants, Rodents and Blind People
I should just repost the whole thing, but I’ll pick and choose the very best parts. Everyone should simply go over there and read…
2009-05-19Read here
SevenLions
Search Visualization
How interesting… Infosthetics just pointed out Google’s new toy, an entry in the realm of visualized search. I just stumbled on FaceSaerch which promises a different kind of visual search experience. I wonder how long it will be before we…
2009-05-18Read here
SevenLions
Wherefore art thou, Wikiatlas?
It’s always of concern when a journal article opens with a vague statement. So when What does Google Earth mean for the Social Sciences? opens a claim that cave painting can be equated to maps, then one has to wonder about the explantory…
2009-05-16Read here
SevenLions
The Hybrid World
Michelle Obama just gave an excellent speech this afternoon, calling upon the latest crop of graduates to remember that they were lucky, and it is the responsibility of the fortunate to look out for the unfortunate. So, naturally, like all…
2009-05-15Read here
SevenLions
Digital History at UC Merced
Tomorrow morning I’ll be giving a presentation on digital history as part of the big commencement celebration coinciding with the visit by first lady Michelle Obama. Along with giving me an opportunity to talk about the importance of using…
2009-05-14Read here
SevenLions
The Digital Bantustan – Connectivity Qua Balkanization
Just finished reading Immanuel Wallerstein’s article in the excellent Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change. Wallerstein is the founder of World Systems Theory, which focuses on the…
2009-05-11Read here
SevenLions
Gaming the Systems
Another interesting point raised at Akahele (The cautious site with the beautiful name) highlights the problem of crowds: the concern for peer-produced data in an environment where some of those peers want to insert malicious,…
2009-05-09Read here
SevenLions
Poor Gimlet
For those of you curious as to how the game is played, it was summed up like…
2009-05-06Read here
SevenLions
Sour Grapes or, I hope Social Computing in 2020 isn’t anything like this
UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project just released the winners of their Social Computing in 2020 competition. I’d put together an entry for this, based on the rise of animation as a medium for non-lingual knowledge formation and…
2009-05-04Read here
SevenLions
Quasi-Amateurs in the Digital Humanities
The last time I was writing about qausi-amateurs in knowledge production, I primarily focused on the phenomenon of scientists writing history, particularly environmental history, because historians trained in the current university system…
2009-05-02Read here
SevenLions
Borough Games
In my ongoing attempts to spurn accepted wisdom and create a blog with no niche, which is sometimes about non-traditional publishing, sometimes about Islamic Art–or was it the Digital Humanities and Environmental History, or is it just…
2009-05-01Read here
SevenLions
The Academic Quasi-Amateur
A recent op-ed by Mark Taylor in the New York Times rightly points out that graduate school isn’t just broken, but has been broken for decades now. Anyone familiar with University, Inc. will know this has something to do with Vannevar…
2009-04-22Read here
SevenLions
Book Review: Lucifer and Lacious
The protagonist of Lucifer and Lacious, a novel by Sean Vincent Lehosit, finds himself wrongfully deposited in Hell, due to some rather convoluted scheming. While it’s always difficult to trod on fictional ground broken by Dante, it’s…
2009-04-21Read here
SevenLions
Hajra Meeks’ Art Exhibit during Michelle Obama’s Visit
This Mughal-inspired, mixed media piece is one of the works to be displayed during Michelle's…
2009-04-19Read here
SevenLions
World Book, the Jaguar E-Type and the Myth of the Expert
As more and more amateurs continue to produce knowledge, software and books with little or no help from experts, I think it’s time to clear the mist a little and remember what the world was producing when only experts were in charge. Too…
2009-04-17Read here
SevenLions
Son of the Great River Posters – Rheem and Naganawae
Both of these posters are available through the Seven Lions Store, and complementary posters are available for bookstores carrying Son of the Great…
2009-04-16Read here
SevenLions
Just How Important was that Bill Gates Guy, Anyway?
Following up on Anthony DiPierro’s comments on my previous post, I realized that our disagreement in whether or not criticisms of crowdsourcing could be considered criticisms of open source was based on a definition. Given my own…
2009-04-15Read here
SevenLions
Are We Really Slouching into a Mediocre Babylon?
Isn’t the Web wonderful? Students aren’t writing their own essays anymore (In fact, they’re looking for contract essay writers for the entire course of their college career). Anthony DiPierro over at akahele makes the case that the…
2009-04-14Read here
SevenLions
The Growth of Abstract Animation on the Web
In the same way that I tried to relate a few details about changes in early Chinese society using animation, there’s now a much more competently produced abstract animated retelling of Little Red Riding Hood by Tomas Nilsson. This goes…
2009-04-13Read here
SevenLions
Book Review - Sons of Avalon
I’m happy to announce that Seven Lions will begin posting reviews of small publisher and print-on-demand books (Fiction and non-fiction). At some point, I’ll comment on this whole setup, typical of Web 2.0, where someone who isn’t a…
2009-04-11Read here
SevenLions
Son of the Great River Posters
We’re just putting the finishing touches on the first series of posters for Son of the Great River. These glossy posters are based on original watercolors like the one above (Based on the pen-and-ink illustration of Rheem from the book)…
2009-04-08Read here
SevenLions
What if you throw a Web 2.0 party and nobody comes?
The Giving Tree is an artifact of an era that later generations will contemplate with pity and horror. An era when many parents turned their children over to subminimum-wage workers by day, and told them stories like The Giving Tree during…
2009-04-04Read here
SevenLions
Introducing the Art of Hajra Meeks
A while back I put together a site to display some beautiful artwork, hand-built in php with css and all the bells and whistles. Then I found out that even though my work was standards-compliant, Internet Explorer sadly isn’t. Now, through…
2009-04-02Read here
SevenLions
Michelle Obama at UC Merced
Well, apparently Cadie didn’t take over the world, and all my INTERCAL studying went to waste. To top it off, I just found out that the First Lady will give the commencement address at the first full graduating class at the first…
2009-04-01Read here
SevenLions
Googlewatch Was Right All Along
Google, always unwilling to take second fiddle to any high-level existentialist act on the part of Wikipedia, has gone and unleashed an AI Singularity with a love for pandas. I choose not to believe that this is the latest in a long string…
2009-03-31Read here
SevenLions
Ricoeur, Ricoeur Everywhere and not a Drop of Significance
That’s the problem with reading about hermeneutics, as soon as you start, everything in your life becomes a piece of some gargantuan puzzle. That must be why so few people study hermeneutics—admirable self-denial. Or maybe it’s because…
2009-03-31Read here
SevenLions
Wikipedia, the True Killer App
Despite having killed more people than Jack the Ripper, Wikipedia appears unsated and has struck down yet another hapless victim. While I’m sure Bill Gates has bigger things on his mind, the death of Encarta isn’t exactly the case of a…
2009-03-28Read here
SevenLions
The Creation of Media as Work
I’ve been reading Ricoeur’s From Text to Action, and I think I’m starting to see the link now between the creation of media (either text or digital) and the creation of literature (here I’ll flatter myself and claim that Son of the Great…
2009-03-25Read here
SevenLions
Son of the Great River Now Out
I can finally announce that my new novel, Son of the Great River, is available on Amazon. If you’d prefer it in eBook form, you can buy it direct from the publisher. But wait, you say, this book is published through some whacko outfit…
2009-03-19Read here
SevenLions
if(Intellectual Property != Creative Property) {
Remember back when Knife Party was just a tag on a San Francisco sidewalk (or maybe that was Monkey Knife Fight… you always forget to document the street art until years later…) and not an awesome piece of digital media deriding the Neocon…
2009-03-17Read here
SevenLions
Animation as Tetrad
I’ve been struggling lately trying to figure out what I mean by animation and how it relates to cartoons, games, diagrams and Edward Tufte. There is, I think, a thread that links strategy gaming to the representation of people (or their…
2009-03-11Read here
SevenLions
The Strategy Game as Digital Humanities Document, Part III
The actual forms of interaction between the elements of a game are, for the most part, the realm of the designer. A player can only be interactive within a gameworld, in whatever manner made available in the creation of the software. While…
2009-03-09Read here
SevenLions
The Strategy Game as Digital Humanities Document, Part II
Seven Cities of Gold, as with many EA products at the time, was known for its high-quality interface and the ease of use it afforded. Management of assets within the game, as well as the movement across the map and the map itself, were…
2009-03-08Read here
SevenLions
The Strategy Game as Digital Humanities Document, Part I
The growing field of historical GIS has led to a concurrent growth in the use of spatially-oriented digital humanities data that is not, necessarily, GIS. The difference between the Ann Knowles edited Past Time, Past Place:GIS for History…
2009-03-03Read here
SevenLions
In Progress
If you’ve stumbled upon this site and you don’t document your code in Middle High German, then you’ll probably be confused. I hope to have everything together in a week or so, and then I’ll start putting out more text than interesting…
2009-03-01Read here
SevenLions
Inchoate, HA!
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 6:08 PM and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
About
Elijah Meeks is the digital humanities specialist at Stanford University. Coming on board in December of 2009, Elijah's earlier academic and technical work included the creation of the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty, requiring an…
UndatedRead here
SevenLions
About
I’m currently the Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford University where I spend my time building absurdly esoteric digital media. I’m also ABD at UC Merced, where my focus is on environmental history and the digital…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Authorial London
The Authorial London application was implemented as an update for Dr. Martin Evan’s original Authorial London, a Student’s Guide. The site is built with Flex and accesses narrative, image and geolocational data stored in a simple MySQL…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Comprehending the Digital Humanities
Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Data
Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further…
UndatedRead here
SevenLions
Digital Humanities
The use of GIS to provide more insight into historical processes has grown into a mature field. In my own work, I focus on the integration of historic environmental with social and political processes, such as the effect of desertification…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Digital Scholarly Media
The term digital scholarly media can refer to one of many products created in academia to visualize, analyze or similarly treat with data and claims traditionally presented using linear, narrative text, typified by monographs and journal…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Digital Scholarly Media
The term digital scholarly media can refer to one of many products created in academia to visualize, analyze or similarly treat with data and claims traditionally presented using linear, narrative text, typified by monographs and journal…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Documents
Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Further Research
Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further…
UndatedRead here
SevenLions
Games
A boardgame and half-formed flash game based on the American Civil War. I’ve heard many times that it is a terrible name, but until someone comes up with a better one, then we’re all…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Gephi Workshop
The next workshop will be held at Stanford in Meyer Library 220 (the Flex classroom) on November 11th at…
UndatedRead here
Gestalt Data Visualization
Gestalt Data Visualization, Part 1: Similarity, Proximity & Enclosure
At a recent talk I challenged the audience to define several gestalt principles based solely on representative figures. This "academic" approach to data visualization seems in opposition to a "pragmatic" approach that focuses on best…
UndatedRead here
Gestalt Data Visualization
Gestalt Data Visualization, Part 2: Common Fate, Parallelism and Connectedness
Movement and implication of movement can improve the ability of readers to identify patterns being displayed but can also damage that ability if not mindfully implemented. Understanding the gestalt principles related to movement and…
UndatedRead here
Gestalt Data Visualization
Gestalt Data Visualization, Part 3: Proximity and Past Experience with Network Visualization
Position of graphical elements in charts cannot be left to chance, even when position does not directly encode a dimension of the data. Contrast the scatterplot, where the XY position of a symbol is directly related to the two dimensions…
UndatedRead here
Gestalt Data Visualization
Gestalt Data Visualization, Part 4: Figure/Ground and Metastability
The classic examples of figure/ground and metastability in gestalt literature involve representations of human faces or familiar objects, and so it might not seem that they have bearing on data visualization. But the graphical elements…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Lightweight Representational Tools
Tools such as Simile Widgets and Processing allow for quick, dynamic visualization of digital humanities datasets useful for public display and for exploring initial hypotheses. The screenshot below is from Simile Exhibit, which…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Lightweight Visualization Frameworks
Tools such as Simile Widgets and Processing allow for quick, dynamic visualization of digital humanities datasets useful for public display and for exploring initial hypotheses. The screenshot below is from Simile Exhibit, which…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Location Metadata for Historical Maps
To aid in rectification of maps but also to work with spatial concepts present within the historic map itself, it would prove valuable to develop a standard for identifying features within a map object’s space. Given the nature of…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Main
The Digital Humanities as a field has been growing in legitimacy and importance within the academy. The use of spatial analytical tools to study historic change, text mining to discover literary trends, databases to track demography or…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Mapping the Grand Tour
A subproject of Mapping the Republic of Letters, Mapping the Grand Tour aims to track visits to the Italian peninsula during the 18th…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Mapping the Republic of Letters
This project was developed in consultation with Nicole Coleman, ATS for the Humanities Center, and is a complete transition from a relational data model to a graph data model for the 80,000 entity MRL database. The original database…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Modeling Place
Probably the greatest criticism of the use of digital methods for the exploration of humanities questions is that the medium distorts the traditionally qualitative nature of humanities scholarship. This is not so much out of necessity, as…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Peer Review
In their January 2010 report, "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication," The Center for Studies in Higher Education detailed the difficulties of addressing peer review of new forms of scholarly communication as well as…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Project Proposals
The School of Humanities and Sciences and Academic Computing Services invite faculty and graduate students in all areas of the humanities to submit a research project…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Projects
Submission Deadline for Fall Quarter 2010 Projects: Friday,…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Route Density
Early on, historical GIS came to refer to the use of quantitative spatial analytical software like ESRI’s ArcGIS to explore traditional historical questions. While the concept of spatial history has grown to include a variety of different…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Route Density in Italy During the 18th Century
Early on, historical GIS came to refer to the use of quantitative spatial analytical software like ESRI's ArcGIS to explore traditional historical questions. While the concept of spatial history has grown to include a variety of different…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Sample Graph Data
DH11 Files DH11 Nodes (CSV) DH11 Edges (CSV) DH11 Network (GEXF) GEXF (Graph Exchange XML Format) Digital Humanities at Stanford – Unformatted (Mixed Network) Digital Humanities at Stanford – Formatted (Mixed Network) Digital…
UndatedRead here
SevenLions
Son of the Great River
Son of the Great River is an adventure story set during the earliest moments of civilization, where the boy Saffu is forced to leave his tribe to travel to the land of cities and kings. It is a short novel meant for an intermediate…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Spatial Services Continuum
As spatial tools and techniques become more available to a wide audience, the need to explicitly define the type and suitability of the wide range of tools becomes more…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Topic Deformation
…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Topics
Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Topology
Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further Research As stated on the topic modeling page for MALLET, “A ‘topic’ consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together.” As such, like automated…
UndatedRead here
Digital Humanities Specialist · Research page
Twitter Network Gallery
One view of the entire network showing all 415,808 nodes but none of the 283,317…

Books

D3.js in Action

Practical guides to building interactive data visualization for the web.

First edition (2015) · Second edition (2017) · Third edition (2024), with Anne-Marie Dufour

Also: Son of the Great River (2009).