Students from the MA New Media (UvA), MA Information Science (UvA) and MA Editorial Design (MaHKU) presented their interactive visualization projects at Crea.

Introduction by Yuri Engelhardt

The Visualizing our World of Data program contained eight presentations (not all of them are described here), many of which were based on Flickr. One of the requirements of the assignment was to gather a suitable dataset within a week, which led many students to opt for the easy to use Flickr photos/API.

WorldMinder

WorldMinder was inspired by GapMinder and contains public awareness data. When mapping world data you need an orientation point and a graph is not suitable for that purpose. Instead, data is mapped onto a world map. It is supplemented with a scatter chart and the main interface view shows three sets of data in one single visualization.

The application has several functions:

• As you can see the color of the dots is consistent with the map which makes it easy to locate the plotted data on the map.
• The red/green colors indicate whether or not the number is below or above the average. You can switch between green/red, for example in the case of HIV you would want a number that is above average colored in red as an alarming color.
• In the bar chart you can compare countries.
• In the x and y-axis you can chart different data, you can create your own view.

WorldMinder is a framework for visualizing datasets and for posing new questions. You can map and chart different datasets and pose new questions through combinations. It is meant as a framework and hopefully in the future it would allow you to import your own datasets and map/visualize them. In the current version you can use it to link different types of visualizations and as a framework for posing questions. What is interesting in this application is that there are “dataless” countries. There is no way to see “non-data” in a scatter chart. WorldMinder also shows you which countries have no available data.

On a technical note, WorldMinder used PHP to retrieve the data, Flash to visualize the data and it’s all stacked in layers using JavaScript. JQuery was used for the interaction between the different displays.

WorldMinder works fine with: Safari 4.0 beta & Firefox Mac/Linux.

Political Discourse Bubbles

This project reminded me  of the ‘US presidential speeches tag cloud’ by Chirag Mehta. The main difference is that it shows all the political parties in the Netherlands and words frequently used in their party programs in order to show their political discourse.

Political Discourse Bubbles

One of the most interesting uses of this project is the feature to map a discourse over time. How has a party program changed and which issues lose or gain attention from political parties? On a small critical note I would like to point out that there is quite some noise in the early periods. The old Dutch way of spelling “the” “and” and all these small words that are filtered out in the tagclouds do appear in the early periods with their old spelling.

New Media Events

New Media Events (Firefox and widescreen only) shows you pictures taken during so called new media events such as The Next Web and the Web 2.0 expo. The team described the application as a way of socializing but I don’t socialize with other new media event visitors through such applications. There are plenty of existing platforms that allow for direct interaction and the sharing of pictures such as Twitter in combination with Twitpic or Mobypicture.

Currently it is a New Media Events calendar which may serve as an archive. New media events are added by the team itself and photos will only appear if tagged appropriately.

Global Party Viewer

The Global Party Viewer aims to visualize events occuring in a specific place in the world on a specific time using Flickr images and their metadata. The application distinguishes between different types of music (rock, classical, techno) but is able to map events with different music types onto the same location by creating an overlap. The GPV is based on the premise of: the more popular the party, the more pictures are shown. With the increase in camera phones and GPS that provide location aware pictures such visualizations will be come richer and richer.

Global Party Viewer

It would be interesting to coorporate with event planners that integrate Flickr pictures such as Upcoming.org which provides specific event tags that may be used by Flickr users.

Shotspot

ShotSpot shows you places worth a visit through the lens of Flickr. It maps specific Flick images (eg: tagged with ‘bike’ – it currently only takes English tags) and places them on the map if the user has geolocated the image. As a visitor, or tourist, where do you go if you want to see a lot of windmills? It also maps the number of pictures taken from a specific object over time which allows for questions: Where do I go in February to see beautiful waterfalls?

Unfortunately using pictures taken at a specific time as a measure for a popular destination disregards the fact that people with jobs usually go on holidays in December or July-August which will cause a rise in the number of pictures. ShotSpot does look at the unique number of visitors for a specific destination and not at the amount of pictures a user uploads during that time.

Another interesting measure for popularity would be Flickr’s own interestingness. Interestingness is based on the number of views and the number of comments. As noted by Prof. Roger Rogers another interesting Flickr specific feature to look at would whether or not the user has a pro account.

ShotSpot (Windows Only/Firefox or Chrome browser – Also works on my Mac with Firefox)
http://www.ronkok.com/work/infvis/pub/

Other projects
PhotoTrail, Zoom into the Zoo, World through my Eyes and “A Tag’s Life” by Daan Odijk.

A tag's life

Previous projects
Two blog postings about last year’s projects / presentations:
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/05/22/visualizing-the-network/
http://www.latebytes.nl/archives/2008/05/een-gevisualise.html

Audience

Photos by Ork de Rooij.

This post is a follow-up on ‘Walled Garden: Communities and Networks post Web 2.0 (part 1)‘

After discussing the various features of walled gardens, we formed groups and focused on one of the three project topics. Our team took a special interest in the semi-permeability and the root systems and feeds of the walled gardens. How do we measure the permeability of sites?

Characteristics of the permeability of a site include whether the site provides an API, embed code, widget, rss, e-mail, share/this button.

One of the ways to visualize the outcomes of our discussions goals concerning dataflows in (semi-permeable) walled gardens is to make a blueprint. Initial sketch:

The following image is a visualization of Walled Garden Data Flows / Characterizing the types of Web 2.0 data flows between three applications: Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Walled Garden, 2008 by the Digital Methods Initiative.

Analysis by Anne Helmond, Sabine Niederer, Auke Touwslager, Laura van der Vlies, Esther Weltevrede. Visualization by Auke Touwslager. © 2008.

As a case study we also attempted to map the data flows of my SNS web data. Please note that this map is far from accurate and complete, it is an initial sketch.

First (unfinished) draft in Illustrator:

A question that arises from data flowing from one site to another is what happens if one person moves with the data? For example, does the Creative Commons license change or disappear?

Yesterday I attended the Amsterdam Flickr Meetup at the NDSM Wharf. An amazing amount of people from all over the world showed up and we spent a great day in Amsterdam North.

I started using Flickr less than a year ago but it only took me a few days to take over two hundred pictures so I decided to get a Pro account. Not only did Flickr spice up my enthusiasm for photography, it also increased the amount of photos I take and my interaction with other photographers. I love to wander through my Flickr contacts and look, enjoy and learn.

My whole Flickr Meetup at the Amsterdam NDSM Wharf set.

Flickr just started offering statistics to it’s pro users, that’s me! I couldn’t be happier. Flickr really loves me!

I just loved their announcement with all the oldskool “under construction” graphics. To honor the good old days, I made an animated gif from the announcement.

I am a stat addict and check my blog statistics more than daily. I am most interested in my referrers because I am curious how and where people found my blog. Flickr was always a kind of black box as I had no idea how people ended up at my pictures. Now I can finally see my photos Google queries and website/blog referrers.

Unfortunately I am currently noticing a new kind of referrer spam with my blog. Not trackback or pingback spam but referrer spam. My log looks like this:

And I must admit, it works. The first few times I actually visited the blog until a noticed a pattern. Anyone else noticing this?

In my previous post I explained why I said goodbye to Zenphoto and Gallery and started explaining why I said hello to Flickr. Flickr offers a free account that has a (bandwidth) uploading limit of 100 Mb a month and a Pro account for 24.95 USD that offers unlimited uploading. I started out with a free account and uploaded some pictures. One of the blogging options from Flickr is the “Blog This” button that sends a picture to your blog once you have configured your blog settings:

Step 1: define your blog software

Step 2: define your API Endpoint (this is the location of your xmlrpc.php file on your server) and supply your WordPress username and password.

Step 3: verify and confirm your details

As you can see Flickr uses the MetaWeblog API service to communicate with your WordPress.

MetaWeblog API (MWA) is a standard client-server application programming interface for weblog (blog) publishing. It is built on XML-RPC.¹

Flickr uses the MetaWeblog API to communicate WordPress using the XML-RPC protocol. The XML-RPC protocol is a very important protocol in blog software as it is also the basis for RSS, ping, trackback and Weblog Clients for offline blogging.

Before we are ready to use the Blog This button we need to define the layout of the image being posted on our blog:

Step 1: choose your template.

Step 2: Preview, use it or customize it.

Step 3: customize the layout. You can adjust the borders here or the text alignment and you can add additional metadata, see step 4.

Step 4: determine which metadata you would like to add or remove.

There are a few interesting things to note here:

• You cannot post images that are larger than 500 pixels wide. The average (medium) display size of a Flickr photo is 500 x 375 px which is very likely linked to the fact that designers are still optimizing webpages for 800 x 600 px displays. According to recent statistics 14% of the computers are still set to a 800 x 600 display². So if you use a 500 pixels width picture you still have 300 pixels left for navigation elements or other elements.
• A lot of blogs themes that have a fixed width layout also stick to the maximum of 800 x 600 (which is actually less because the browser sidebars take up space to). The traditional blog sidebar is around 150-180 pixels and if you add margins to leave some whitespace between your content you are left with an average blog picture that is also around 500 pixels.
• Customizing your layout is seen as something geeky and we are warned, as if we are about to do something dangerous: “Watch out! You have to be pretty geeky to add this stuff!”

Send a test post to your blog or just test the Blog This button and it should work great! We are now ready to display all the Flickr photos on our blog and our recent Flickr additions in the sidebar. Continue reading for my Flickr adventures and how to turn your WordPress blog into a Flickr photoblog.

1. MetaWeblog – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 27 April 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaWeblog>. [↩]
2. Browser Statistics. 27 April 2007 <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>. [↩]

My website, before I turned it into a blog, consisted mainly of a small portfolio. I hardly ever updated my portfolio except that I added a few pictures now and then in the photography section. Even though I was technically capable of designing and coding a minor addition or update could sometimes mean major work. This is one of the reasons I switched to the WordPress blog software; to facilitate easy additions. What WordPress doesn’t facilitate however is the easy uploading and managing of (multiple) files, see my post “Uploading and file management in WordPress.”

Because of the serveral reasons mentioned in my previous post I tried a few standalone galleries that handle the uploading and managing of photos much better. I tried two galleries that are both written in PHP (just like WordPress) and offer plugins to integrate with WordPress.

First I tried Gallery2 with the WPG2 plugin for WordPress but this resulted in some problems. On top of that I couldn’t get the Gallery to integrate in the look of my WordPress theme and after fiddling with the files for hours I simply gave up. I moved to the nice looking minimalistic Zenphoto with the ZenPress plugin for WordPress. File uploading is very easy, you just upload everything to a folder with the appropriate name and it automatically creates a photo folder with that same name. You can adjust titles and other information instantly thanks to Ajax. The ZenPress plugin adds a button to your visual editor to add photos but the interface is rather awkward. First you have to select a category and then you have to insert your pictures one by one, where you can chose from a range of options such as size and alignment for each of them. Unfortunately there is no way to insert a whole album into your blog with one click. You can set defaults for inserting your pictures but even with this option if you want to insert thumbnails for all the pictures in an album this means that you have to follow (at least) three steps:

1. Click ZenPress button
2. Select album
3. Select picture

Imagine if you have twenty pictures in an album. Of course you can link one picture to your album but then your visitor leaves your blog and goes to your album. What I want is to integrate the albums into my blog.

Another problem I encountered is that I am limited to a certain amount of webspace and bandwidth by my host. I have a basic account which means I can upload a total of 500 Mb and have 10gig a month of data traffic. When uploading pictures you easily reach the 500 Mb (a high res picture is almost 2 Mb). My main reason for using my own webspace for my pictures was that I wanted all my things in the same place. Of course I could buy more webspace, doubling my webspace to 1gig (and bandwidth to 20gig) would mean an additional 30 euros, but my whole photo archive is over 25 gig! It also wouldn’t solve my problem of integrating a gallery with WordPress. I had to search for a solution that might include hosting my pictures somewhere else. Then I rediscovered Flickr (Pro), which is even cheaper than doubling my webspace. A long time ago I used to have a Flickr account but I never used it because I used my own webspace so I deleted my account. But Flickr has grown (and so has my archive!) and expanded and don’t even get me started on the features they offer! Continue reading for my Flickr adventures and how to make a WordPress Flickr photoblog.