rbos:
How do presidential candidates compete… according to Youtube views. Rick Perry and Ron Paul are head-on-head in the last week of december. If the viewers are positive or negative is not included. The most viewed election movie is Rick Perry. But he also managed to pass Rebecca Black with most dislikes on Youtube.
Nice use of statistics by Youtube. Check it out at youtube.com/politics. (via @yusufarslan)
First prototypeI finally got around to making my first prototype of the semester. This six-foot by three-foot printout was a framework to observe how people would interact with a map in a public setting. Simple instructions urged people to label the world with different colored stickers. Much to my surprise, a crowd quickly gathered and filled the map with dots indicating place of birth and locations visited.
What did I learn?
- People enjoyed using this and it became a social gathering
- Location and placement of this prototype was important to get maximum foot traffic
- At its present size, several people could use this simultaneously with spectators looking on
- A few people customized stickers or added unique annotations, but by and large, most people simply followed the instructions. Lesson: provide the tools (pens, markers) right by the map to make it as easy as possible to carry out this task.
- The green dots (could be used for any purpose) were not labeled; can I assume these signified locations people want to travel to?
- Low-tech paper prototyping proved to be fun for the users and effective for me
- What I assumed would take days to fill in the map with stickers, took 15 minutes
- I should have bought more stickers, as I ran out of blue (places visited) dots
- According to the red dots, two of my classmates (or possibly faculty members) were born in Bulgaria… I had no idea! Who?
Next step: refine prototype and increase the fidelity
Due to the good public transportation in the Netherlands distance has become irrelevant. We can reach almost any destination by train easily and relatively quick. In our busy lives we now think in time rather than distance. Therefore the current maps, as we know them today, are obsolete.
Via Laughing Squid, WNYC
“Infographic Of The Day: The Insane Choices You Face At The Drug Store” #infographic http://bit.ly/utLNVR
Mapping Language Communities
Via Flowing Data:
Eric Fischer maps language communities on Twitter using Chrome’s open-source language detector. Each color, chosen to make differences more visibly obvious, represents a language. English is represented in dark gray, which is used just about everywhere, so it doesn’t obscure everything else.
It’s interesting to see that language forms national boundaries via the data as Fischer did not actually include formal boundaries when creating his map.
Filed under: Creative use of tools and APIs of the day
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
Is that a run, a kill or a fork? Or is it actually just a regular old stream? When it comes to naming waterways, it all seems to depend on your geography.
This map, created by designer Derek Watkins, color-codes the waterways of the U.S. by names they’re given. As Watkins explains, these names have their own name: toponyms, which are general descriptions of geographic features. The degree of geographical concentration of certain name types is pretty striking. Brooks tend to stay in New England, and bayous are primarily in the Louisiana-Mississippi area. Cañadas, rios and arroyos are concentrated in the Southwest. Branches seem to have the widest territory, covering much of the southeastern corner of the country.
We grabbed some 50,000 geotagged photos from Flickr, analyzed the pixel colors of each photo, then mapped a grid of the most frequent color hues.
