The Stanford Visualization Group have been responsible for a number of fantastic tools for supporting information visualisation work. One of the inherent problems in creating data visualisations is that you usually do not get the data in a format that is particularly easy to work with. Cleaning up the data is one of the first things that you must to, so that you can take out extraneous data points, pare down to what you want to actually work with, and then format the information logically, so that it will be easy to incorporate into your visualisation software or code.
This step, data cleaning, is usually a real hassle and Excel is not very good for the task, because it’s not really made to do this sort of thing. Although you can delimit by commas, tabs or arbitrary characters, it’s a pain to write regular expressions that allow you to take out things or re-order them. You can write scripts to do this, but then you’re busy writing scripts instead of creating a visualization.
That’s why I’m very excited about Wrangler, a new tool for data wrangling that substantially reduces the pain associated with this process.
Check out their video and head on over to try it for yourself!
I’m very pleased to announce that iBats is now available for download from the iTunes App Store. It’s been about 18 months in the making since I first met with Dr Kate Jones at the Institute of Zoology (IoZ) to flesh out the user requirements and begin the process of creating the application. If you are interested in bats and becoming a “citizen scientist” too, you can check out the IoZ website for the Indicator Bats Programme, register, and download the iPhone or the Android application.
At the Art.on.Wires Festival in May I talked about three recent projects: spacehoppers, my visualization of the Londons bicycle hire system, and NetChimes. I discussed some of the technical details about how these projects were realised and reflected upon the process of building those interactions. I aso demoed the NetChimes audio feed with participants in the audience tuning in, during the talk. Art.on.Wires had a really good feel this year, very cozy, with lots of people learning, hacking, chatting and making things happen. There were several live performances involving collaboration with off-site musicians and dancers, with live feeds streaming in from around the world. My friend Jason Geistweidt had a preview of work he has been doing in the process of creating the World Opera, involving dancers from southern California and dancers in Oslo interacting via life-size video projections and audio. Nice stuff.
Video of my talk is below, but note the title is “Connecting the Physical and the Digital” and not “Of Bits and Bikes” which I presented in London at sameAs.
This weekend, I finished up a prototype sensor for the NetChimes Projects‘s London site. It’s a bit rudimentary, but it’s a first step. The sensor responds to wind currents outside our London flat, using an Arduino to detect when the clapper strikes the sensing ring. These events are rerouted as serial information to a PureData sketch and forwarded to a Shoutcast server. You can listen to the stream by going to the NetChimes Shoutcast server for London and selecting the Listen link in the middle of the page (or click here). You will receive a “playlist” file which can be opened in iTunes, VLC or Internet Explorer (with the right plug in), allowing you to listen to the sample stream from the London site. Note, that if the wind is not blowing, you won’t hear anything, but there is a station ID announcement every 30 minutes, at the top and middle of the hour.
This sensor prototype will be the basis for the full version of the NetChimes london location, using the impressive King David Chimes (from Woodstock Chimes). For now, you can listen in to the live stream or go to the NetChime Project site and listen to the other streams from Tromso North, Tromso South, or Bournemouth. We’ll be bringing on other streams from Oslo at Art.on.Wires, next week.
Our Taking on the Teenagers project at the London Knowledge Lab aims to increase teenagers’ awareness about energy use. The £1.5M research project was featured on Radio4′s Costing the Earth programme this past week. This is key work in the important problem of starting with young people to raise social awareness of the problems of energy consumption and limited resources and it is good to have a bit of media exposure about it.
This is part of a larger programme about teenagers and energy. Details about the Taking on the Teenagers project start at about 06:45. Listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer
I’ve been collecting a good deal of data about the Barclays cycle hire bikes using a great little API, which has taken a lot of the pain out of screen scraping the Boris Bikes website. I’ve got several Mb of data now and have got to where I can start to do plots over time. Mapping coloured circles to the number of bikes available has given me a nice little visualisation of the distribution of bikes over the course of the day. I’ll be talking about the project at sameAs on 28 March. And of course, I’ll be continuing work on the ambient display.
It turns out that some of the people over at CASA-UCL, my alma mater, have also been working on this problem (there’s nothing new under the sun!), using historical data obtained from the cycle hire scheme – as recently demoed at Dokbot London.
I’m currently working on the NetChimes project with a group of friends and collaborators in the US and Europe. The result will be an interactive instrument that communicates OSC data live across 4 countries, and which takes local wind currents as inputs into the performance. For the London location (to be sited at Goldsmiths), I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a donation of King David chimes (1.7 metres tall!) from Woodstock Chimes in the US (probably the highest quality manufacturer of precisely tuned consumer chimes). The next step will be designing and mounting the actuator mechanism. Specs forthcoming. Many thanks to Woodstock Chimes for their support!
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