Informatics
Butterflies, semacodes and wireless cemeteries September 12, 2008
When he's not figuring out knotty IA problems for the Times, my colleague Elliott Malkin works as an artist exploring the intersections between memory, information and physical spaces. He'll be talking about his work at the upcoming IDEA conference in...
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Takin' it to the streets April 10, 2008
Now this has got to be a first: a mob of angry protesters storming the streets of Oslo to fight the good fight against ... would you believe, OpenXML? Steve Pepper (whose company I enjoyed at last week's Topic Maps...
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Topic Maps 2008 March 17, 2008
I'm looking forward to trekking over to Oslo in a couple of weeks for Topic Maps conference. For those of you who follow this kind of thing, topic maps are an emerging framework for organizing subject-specific information: “Subject-centric computing” is...
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Analog infographics February 13, 2008
Biblical infographics by the late Clarence Larkin: and A Timeline of Timelines by Sasha Archibald & Daniel Rosenberg:...
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Textmap August 24, 2007
Textmap is an experimental "entity search engine" with some nifty data visualization features for putting news stories in context. In addition to the kinds of things you might expect - like topic maps, and graphs showing the frequency of stories...
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Genographic world map July 3, 2007
National Geographic has created a nifty interactive map that tracks the historical migration of different human groups around the world over the past 200,000 years. This reminds me a little of the old Eames film Atlas, which showed a time-lapsed...
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A Scanner and a Mission June 13, 2007
Paul Ford talks about digitizing the Harper's archive in this AIGA interview with David Barringer. I already knew Paul had more-or-less designed and built the whole thing himself, including the brilliantly idiosyncratic front end, but I never would have guessed...
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The Web That Wasn't March 27, 2007
I've just posted the slides from my IA Summit presentation via Slideshare: The session seemed to go reasonably well. I'm glad to see there was an audience willing to turn out for a historically-focused session, helping to dispel my suspicion...
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Danny Hillis on the Knowledge Web March 14, 2007
In the wake of Danny Hillis's Metaweb project launch, Edge has just published a follow-up to his 2004 essay, Aristotle: The Knowledge Web. Here Hillis does a good job of articulating the project's basic premise: In retrospect the key idea...
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Metaweb March 9, 2007
Supercomputer pioneer Danny Hillis's new Metaweb project is an ambitious effort to create a user-generated database mapping the relationships between a potentially endless array of topics. It sounds like an impossibly far-reaching project, but if anyone can pull something like...
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Map of science March 4, 2007
Interaction designer W. Bradford Paley (of TextArc fame) created this intriguing visualization mapping the relationships between 800,000 scientific research papers. As to what the image depicts, it was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers (shown as white dots) into...
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Unraveling the Quipu January 6, 2007
A few weeks ago I mentioned the Quipu, the ancient Incan "computer" that provided a tool for keeping track of information in a culture with no written language. The latest Wired features an excellent piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer...
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Gamer Theory December 12, 2006
The Institute for the Future of the Book has published Internet theorist MacKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory (a.k.a. G4M3R 7H30RY) in a new experimental online format. It's an interesting foray - not to mention a remarkable contortion of Wordpress -...
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Information Aesthetics December 5, 2006
Information Aesthetics is a newish blog devoted to data visualization, industrial/interface design and various flavors of Tuftian eye-candy. > Information Aesthetics...
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The Quipu November 30, 2006
On a recent trip to Chile, Gene Smith discovered the Quipu, an ancient Incan tool for information storage and retrieval. I also came across the Quipu recently while doing some research for a book I've been working on. Here's what...
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Greek Gearheads November 29, 2006
Researchers have started to make progress in reverse-engineering the so-called Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek "computer" from 150 BC: The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and...
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Memory maps October 7, 2006
Earlier this week, I dropped in on a discussion about physical and digital spaces (blogged elsewhere by Peter and Mike K.) that ranged pretty widely over topics related to geography and location-based data. At one point, Jeff showed us Flickr's...
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Dirk September 20, 2006
Matt Webb has relaunched Dirk, a clever little application that lets users free-associate between any number of topics, then make those associations visible to other users, who layer on their own connections. The name, I am guessing, may be a...
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Anatopic Obliteration August 7, 2006
Gartner's Nick Gall sent a few comments on my earlier posts about the obliteration phenomenon (archived here and here). He suggests that Eugene Garfield's usage of the term may be too broad, encompassing what are actually two discrete trends: Permanent...
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Beyond the tag cloud July 31, 2006
For those of us who tend to agree with Zeldman's pronouncement that "tag clouds are the new mullets," Rashmi Sinha has written a solid piece in search of more useful, less hackneyed approaches to tag interfaces. She specifically looks at...
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Transquoter June 20, 2006
I've been playing around with Ted Nelson's Transquoter, the first working component of his Transliterature project, the philosophical successor to his storied, star-crossed Xanadu project. Transquoter demonstrates Nelson's vision for moving beyond one-way, Web-style hyperlinks, by letting you embed "live"...
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Palimpsests and Page Rank June 9, 2006
A few weeks ago I posted an entry about Eugene Garfield's notion of the "obliteration phenomenon," the bibliographical paradox in which important original works often get eclipsed by subsequent derivative works. The canonical example is Einstein's Theory of General Relativity,...
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Missing the point? May 22, 2006
For the last couple of weeks, Kevin Kelly's "Scan This Book" article in the New York Times Magazine has prompted a resurgence of the seemingly endless debate about the death of the book. Yesterday, no less a figure than John...
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In Search of Cutter's Catalog May 18, 2006
Last week, I paid a visit to the Boston Athenaeum, one of the world's oldest private subscription libraries. Tucked down a quiet block at 10 1/2 Beacon Street, the building is easy to miss. Step inside, however, and the doors...
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Tree of Life April 19, 2006
Jim Mason pointed me to the Tree of Life, an ambitious Web-based project allowing biologists to collaborate on capturing the entire phylogeny of life on earth. The site lets you explore all the major taxa on the evolutionary tree, from...
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The Oil Age April 15, 2006
The Oil Age is a skillful and sobering piece of information design by an outfit called SF Informatics. Billed as a "Tool for Examining the Geologic Realities and Social Ramifications of the Modern World's Most Prized Resource," it makes a...
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Between the cracks April 5, 2006
Nadav has a thoughtful post on how people project their identities in the so-called "behavior economy": [W]e have to find ways of inserting our personality into the cracks of the data structures (the tags we use, our AIM status messages...
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IA Summit: Stone Age Information Architecture March 27, 2006
Yesterday morning, I gave my presentation at the IA Summit. The slides should be up soon on the Summit Web site; but for now, here's a quick recap of my talk. Update: the slides are now available (note: Firefox users...
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Hyperwords March 1, 2006
Frode Heglund makes the case for a new kind of hyperlink: a "hyperword." Briefly, the idea is to supplant the traditional author-determined link with a set of user-controlled interactions. Hyperwords allow users to interact with any text in many ways....
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The Whuffie Paradox February 17, 2006
Eugene Garfield coined the term "obliteration phenomenon" to describe an interesting bibliographical paradox: sometimes the most influential writing leaves almost no mark in the paper trail. The canonical example is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which, despite its obvious importance...
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Probability, Superstition and Ideology revisited January 3, 2006
Gartner's Nick Gall sent along a few thoughts on my earlier post Probability, Superstition and Ideology (itself a commentary on earlier posts by Nick Carr and Chris Anderson). With Nick's permission, I've excerpted his comments here: "The image of a...
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Probability, Superstition and Ideology December 19, 2005
Nick Carr makes the humanist case against Chris Anderson's defense of probabilistic systems like Google and Wikipedia, taking issue with Anderson's argument that qualitative criticisms of these systems fail to recognize the virtues of sacrificing "perfection at the microscale for...
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Tags as ideology April 20, 2005
Gene Smith has written an excellent critique of Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated thesis. While I'm as burned out as anyone by now with windbagging about tags and folksonomies, I do think Gene makes several refreshingly new points here. In...
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The Poetess and the She-monster March 26, 2005
In 1624, the English playwright Thomas Heywood published the Gunaikeion, an encyclopedic study of his favorite subject: women. Inside this thick volume, readers would find tales of brave queens, learned ladies, chaste damsels, Amazons, witches, even a transgendered woman or...
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Folksonomic zeitgeist February 28, 2005
The Observer is playing around with folksonomies, asking all of their contributors to classify their articles using free-form keywords, then exposing the emerging folksonomy via the newspaper's blog. What's interesting here is the attempt to marry a top-down hierarchy (newspaper...
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Sandy Berman, Freetagging Old School January 24, 2005
Back in the 1970s, Sanford (Sandy) Berman, the head cataloger at Hennepin County Library in Minnesota, did something librarians rarely do: He started making up his own subject headings. Flouting the prevailing Library of Congress cataloging standards, Berman sparked a...
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Musicplasma January 5, 2005
Musicplasma creates visualizations of collaborative filtering data about musical artists. While these kinds of hyperbolic treemaps are hardly a new idea, I think the execution works pretty well here; unlike most of those cloying Brain-style interfaces, I can actually envision...
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Folksonomies redux September 7, 2004
There's been some follow-up discussion on folksonomies (cf. my earlier post) by Peter, Clay, Victor, and Jon, and what I believe is a related thread about Wikipedia vs. traditional Encyclopedias by Joi, Matt and Cory. Both discussions seem to boil...
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Power maps October 13, 2003
France's Tangential University goes in search of the elusive global power structure, via a series of maps tracing the networks of influence that bind the world's governments, commercial and religious institutions. Brian Holmes explains it all in his essay Mapping...
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GLUT:
Mastering Information Through the Ages
New Paperback Edition
“A penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on the information age and its historical roots.”
—Los Angeles Times
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