More experiments with Twitter visualisation, aided and abetted by tutorials over at OUseful.
If you fancy having a go yourself, a few quick steps…
- Download and install R (also, get over the fact that the site was put together by a statistician)
- Download, install and open RStudio
- Type install.packages(“ggplot2”) into the console and press enter
- Type whichever number is nearest to you and press enter - you just installed a package
Pretty much all the rest is covered over on OUseful (you just need to repeat step three for any other packages needed).
Quick ‘n’ dirty histogram of the #kanye hashtag on Twitter.
I’ve recently started dipping my toe into Social Network Analysis across this tutorial on starting out with open source graphing app Gephi - my first bash at graphing a social network since an ill-advised sixth form project called the “love web”…
This time round, what you can see is a rather more sober visualisation of my Facebook ego network (without the ego, and ignoring weak ties i.e. friends who don’t know any of my other friends).
In case it’s not obvious, the nodes are people, and the edges show friendships (in the Facebook sense); the layout is worked out by a force-based algorithm, and the colouring is from an automatic function to cluster by modularity (i.e. how closely knit a particular set of people are). What struck me was the ease with which I could work out what each colour meant - I don’t think I could have done a better job doing it by hand.
On the right hand side are people I’ve worked with - POKE on top, and Government underneath, the green bunch are mostly school friends, and the rest are mostly people I met while at University (or friends met through those people). Yellow from my course, blue were housemates, and the remainder my main social circle (red generally people I met before I spent a year in France, orange afterwards).
I downloaded the OpenPaths iPhone App shortly before heading off for an amazing week of skiing in the trois vallées in the French Alps, and put together this really simple little animation using their web interface showing five days of skiing (and our eight hour train journey back to London).
OP is the latest of many great ideas to come out of the NY Times R&D lab, and other than offering a personal locker for geolocation data, they intriguingly promise a platform allowing users to give access to this information to researchers, artists, and technologist. You can access your data via an API, download as JSON, KML or CSV, and connect up Foursquare (other Apps soon to follow).
Knowledge is now the property of the network. The smartest person in the room is the room itself.
David Weinberger in Too Big to Know
Can’t believe this hadn’t come to my attention before. Great idea.
What better way to kick off the new year than with words of wisdom from those who have threaded before us? That’s precisely the premise of advice to sink in slowly, a wonderful project enlisting design graduates in passing on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters — part Live Now, part Everything Is Going To Be OK, part Wisdom, part something completely refreshing, based on the idea that we all have subjective wisdom we wish we’d known earlier, but often don’t get a chance to pass it on to those who can benefit from it in a way that makes them pay heed.
You can also buy fundraising posters, 100% of the proceeds going to fund free posters for first years. Do it!
A talk by Nicholas Felton (he of Feltron Annual Report & Facebook Timeline fame) entitled Numerical Narratives (recorded at Eyeo Festival 2011).
Incidentally, if you’re wondering when the 2011 Annual Report is out…
@inorganik if all goes well, it’ll be out by the end of the month.
— Nicholas Felton (@feltron) January 3, 2012
These are particles with a will
Dirk Helbing on Pedestrians.
IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?
The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why.
The Size (reposted from faststream.hmg.gov.uk)
Before I joined Poke, I spent a couple of years in the UK Civil Service as one of the first few people to join via the Technology in Business Fast Stream, launched a few years ago to plug the (then widening) digital skills gap in Government. When I was asked by the Cabinet Office to write about some of my experiences last year, I put together the post below, which was published last May.
While I enjoyed the time I spent in Whitehall, and feel like we made a lot of progress in the short time I was at HMRC, there were a few of us who felt constrained by the technological limitations that come from working in the Public Sector (my main bugbear being having to use IE6…), and who have taken since swapped Whitehall for Tech City Silicon Roundabout.
The Fast Stream team have recently removed all posts by those of us who have recently moved on - they’ve made some positive first steps onto Facebook, but still don’t quite get the idea of blogging…
I’ve therefore reposted the article below (and added back in the links), which hopefully will be of use to those out there who are looking to apply to TiB.
How Big…?
One thing that hits you when you first start working in central government is the sheer scale of operations, particularly if you working for one of the larger Departments. The numbers at HMRC tell the story (up to a point): £435.1bn of tax collected, £39bn in benefits and tax credits paid out, 61 million calls handled via Contact Centres, three million visits to our Enquiry Centres, 9.9 million letters received (these numbers are for 2009/10).
How about our website? Towards the end of January when people file their tax return online, it becomes the third busiest in the world, beaten only by Facebook and Google. You don’t need much imagination to understand how integral ICT is to delivering these numbers, but it takes a surprising amount of creativity and ingenuity to understand how to meet the challenges we now face.
