Picking up where I have left, I have a nice addition to my collection of colour tools for visualisation experts: http://color.hailpixel.com What you see below is the whole interface, when you open the website by Devin Hunt. Choosing colours is easy as pie: Move your mouse pointer around and the area changes its colour. Once you … Continue reading Hailpixel’s colour tool
When designing a map or a visualisation, sooner or later there is the point where you have to choose a range of colours (except in very specific circumstances which may require you to produce a black-and-white or greyscale visualisation). What is there to consider in such a situation?
Appropriate use of colours
According to Bertin‘s (1918–2010) seminal work, Semiologie Graphique, colour (defined as hue with constant value) as a visual variable is both selective and associative. These mean, respectively, that an object with slightly differing hue can be selected with ease out of a group of objects and that objects with identical colour but differing values for other visual variables (e.g., in the case of shape as the other variable: a red circle, a red square and a red triangle) can easily be grouped mentally. Continue reading “Colour me well-informed”
Another New York find: If the evolution of the NYC skyline and street grid interested you, you might also fall for this time-lapse movie by H. Caesar of his arrival in NYC by ship (click on “vimeo” in below player to watch the video at bigger size): A nice idea, to shoot time-lapse from a moving … Continue reading Time-lapse movie of shipping up to New York
I remember my early days of computing: There has been a lot of command line stuff going on (and QBASIC programming). Then came Windows 3.1 et al. on our home computer and Macs at school. Later, at university with Unix there has been more command line action again. Nevertheless, computing has clearly become more graphical … Continue reading The sketchbook holding the GUI design of early Macs
After the last post I have to report about a movie again already: Part of the Off Book series by PBS Arts, the short documentary gives a glimpse into computer generative art. Computer generative art in the words of Luke Dubois (starring in the documentary) is
[art] where you surrender control over some aspect what’s going down to some [computer] process.
Generative Art: Computers, Data, and Humanity portrays three artists and their work.
In Turning Data Into Music and Stories Luke Dubois tells how he turned casualties, missing and refugees of 8 years of war in Iraq into an 8 minute musical piece. Dubois says the reason for him to do that was, that the Iraq war is the first conflict of the U.S. where we have more data than information. I am not sure whether this is true from the information side (i.e. whether people were better informed about other wars), but modern gizmos and equipment certainly do produce heaps of data and thus maybe, in fact, make us know or feel less about what is going on.
I also found myself agreeing to Dubois saying:
This century is the century of data. That’s gonna be the defining thing.
I would add to that: and how we approach that heap of data. We amass such amounts of data that turning it into valuable, actionable information is getting harder and harder. In some fields, where data was hard or expensive to get, the situation has changed and we now seek for ways how to filter and intelligently assess incoming data streams. This is certainly true for many fields in Geography.
Wired has a gallery of ten iconic images of our planet from space, three of which are displayed below – enjoy! Continue reading Blue marble pictures
Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has a blogpost about the many terms floating around visualization. It’s worth reading! But, in my opinion, not complete without Robert Kosara’s sometimes constrasting view. Terminology is often flourishing in thriving disciplines where people seek to differentiate themselves and find their niche. It’s probably not that bad, but while potentially adding … Continue reading Terminology is a beast: The many names of visualization
See the wide channel that runs from left to right with the windy river in it? You are looking at one of the most amazing stories in geological history ever. I’d like to tell you about it. Over on Scienceblogs, Greg Laden has a great article. He starts by looking at above map and digs … Continue reading A tale of times long gone
While the news on Historypin is still fresh, the next project made its way onto my radar. Like Historypin, the “What was there” project crowdsources photos from times past and has them geocoded by users/contributors a.k.a. produsers. You can browse the collection on their website or using their mobile app – provided you’re living in … Continue reading “What was there” project: More geocoded old photographs
While Google Earth is still around, it makes sense to maximise its usefulness. The Google Earth Blog shares some nice pointers how to tune your GEarth installation in case you experience performance issues. They’ve also recently covered a company called KMZmaps.com which offers a set of custom KMZ overlays for use in GEarth. Honestly, I … Continue reading Some GEarth tips
Behold this HD timelapse video of the view aboard the International Space Station (ISS). I can’t find first-hand information on its author, but PopSci claims that it was created by a certain James Drake, who stitched together 600 publicly available images shot from the ISS. The cities’ lights look great, especially together with the frequent thunderstorms lighting up the clouds (watch in HD and full-screen)! Continue reading “Timelapse video lets you ride the ISS – Canada to Chile in a minute”
Apparently, Iranian officials have decided to build a service to counter the success of Google Earth, which is described as a website that “was designed and built by the global arrogance for espionage purposes and to gather information from other countries” (Brigadier-General Mohammad Hasan Nami quoted in a Mehr news agency report). The new website … Continue reading A GEarth challenger from Iran
