We don't know how long this one's been around, but kudos to the gang at the WashPost for taking a concept/tool somewhat on the margin and putting it to good use for both reporters and readers. See http://projects.washingtonpost.com/potus-tracker/
Every day President Obama meets with key members of his administration, Congress, foreign dignitaries, interest groups and regular citizens. Use our interactive database to track how Obama is spending his time, what issues are getting the most attention and who is influencing the debate. Subscribe to daily schedule via RSS.
CREDIT: Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Madonna Lebling, Karen Yourish, Ryan O'Neil, Wilson Andrews, Jacqueline Kazil, Todd Lindeman, Lucy Shackelford, Paul Volpe
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OK, OK. Using R can be a steep hill to climb for some. But here, thanks to O"Reilly Radar, is a pretty good video of a presentation on using R as a Social Network Analysis tool.
Update II: It occurred to me that it would be much better for people to be able to view the entire talk in a single video, rather than having to switch between sections; therefore, I uploaded the whole thing to Vimeo.
Tonight I will be givingOn August 6th I gave a talk at the New York City R Meetup on how to perform social network analysis in R using the igraph package. Below are the slides I will be going over covered during the talk, and all of the code examples from the presentation are available in the ZIA Code Repository in the R folder.
Below is a video of this talk, with a link to the slides I review during the presentation. If you are interested, I suggest downloading the slides and following along with videos while having the slides open, as much of what is on the screen in the video is hard to read.
Andrew Little’s presentation on econometrics in R using Zelig and MatchIt are also available on YouTube starting here. I hope you enjoy the presentation, and please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Much of this is well-known by those of us who have worked with dataviz for the past decade or two, but his ending conclusions are solid and worth reviewing.
Key quote from Jeffrey Veen: "We need to create tools to help people manipulate THEIR data."
Good examples of how to use large data sets to find and tell stories and, if desired, to answer YOUR questions about the data.
Video: Designing for Big Data
This is a 20-minute talk I gave at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. In it, I describe two trends: how we're shifting as a culture from consumers to participants, and how technology has enabled massive amounts of data to be recorded, stored, and analyzed. Putting those things together has resulted in some fascinating innovations that echo data visualization work that's been happening for centuries.
I've given this talk a few times now, but this particular delivery really went well. Only having 20 minutes forced me to really stay focus, and the large audience was very engaged. I'll be giving an extended version of this talk in June at the UX London conference, with a deeper look at how we integrated design and research while I was at Google.
Amy Disch, library director of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, sends along these links via the News Librarians' listserv (newslib@listserv.unc.edu). This is a gentle reminder about how the foundations of good publications today rest, first, on the integration of library AND IT skills.
No story? Then check out Swivel, a web site rich with data -- and the display of data -- that you didn't know about and which is pregnant with possibilities for a good news feature. And often a news feature that could be localized.
Here, for example, is a posting from the SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005 illustrating the changing trends in the the classification and de-classification of U.S. government data. (You can probably guess the direction of the curves.)
The
number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number
of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.
The 2006 Knight-Batten Awards given by J-Lab are out. All are worth looking at, but one caught our eye, one of the "Niche News" awards in the "Notable Entries" category. Clearly, a lot of legwork on the streets of Boston went into this well-designed project. Now the only question is: Who will keep it updated and how? bostonchinatown.org Emerson College
Journalism (Boston, MA)
"Quintessential
visualization of civic mapping ...
Tell us more about these people." -2006
Knight-Batten Advisory
Board Judges
Sixteen
Emerson journalism graduate students put
in a combined 500 hours of original reporting
to develop this web chart. The chart displays
connections between more than 100 newsmakers,
organization leaders and activists in Boston’s
Chinatown based on who talks with whom about
local news. The map also acts as a directory
with personal profiles available to help
people connect.
Social scientists create maps of online interactions
Multimedia:Maps and audio charting human interactions in cyberspace
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Philadelphia
If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?
That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager
to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.
Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and
interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on
computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on
human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal
patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the
act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints
in the sand....
Mapping the World : An Illustrated History of Cartography- by Ralph E. Ehrenberg Mapping the World
is a collection of cartographic treasures that spans thousands of years
and many cultures, from an ancient Babylonian map of the world etched
on clay to the latest high-tech
maps of the earth, seas and the skies above. With more than one hundred
maps and other illustrations and an introduction and running commentary
by Ralph E. Ehrenberg, this book tells a fascinating story of
geographic discovery, scientific invention and the art and technique of
mapmaking. From National Geographic, 2005.
Source: Directions Magazine
Social
Network Theory and its principles are applied by more and more
companies in a way that some of us might not be aware of yet. So what
we buy, how we rate products/services, post in forums, pictures we
upload or present of ourselves on the web is significantly influencing
other, likeminded individuals. In return we are influenced by the
network cluster we belong to for a specific habit and the like. Collaborative filtering is a key component of using social networks for different purposes. Further information can be found here. Below you will find a list of various industry and application examples:
Social Networking plattforms
There are the obvious social networking online plattforms. Among them
are the open business and personal contact manegement oriented like Tribe.net , openbc, friendster or the inivitation only communities like asmallworld.
Either planned or already implemented users can take advantage of added
services (search functionality, messaging) by paying a monthly fee
10< USD. Furthermore, there are the rather dating/partner match
making plattforms like match or eharmony.
Retail/eCommerce
Most of today's ecommerce sites use collaborative filtering to improve
sales, cross-,up- and downselling. A prominent example are Amazon's recommendations based on various user behaviours on their website.
Music/Radio
Tapping into our musical tastes Last FM, Genielab or Pandora present us with streaming music. Here the main business model lies in linking to the respective ecommerce sites like Apple's iTunes.
Movies and more MovieLens
is a free service provided by GroupLens Research at the University of
Minnesota. Whether, you want to book a hotel, whole vacation there are
numerous examples of collaborative filtering apps on websites.
Pictures
The most prominent example for sharing, managing and searching for pictures is Flickr or myspace. The latter gaining revenues from online-ads.
Search engines
As I have elaborated in an earlier entry on google bombs the network structure (ties) play an important role in search engine algorithms.
Knowledge Base and OpenSource
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia builds on the power of decentralized, voluntary collaboration building an enourmous depository of multi-language information. Whether it was the development of Linux, Mozilla/Firefox or MySQL all rely on and consist of social networks. Further examples of openSource projects can be found at Sourceforge.
SNA Consulting
As we can see the character and concepts of networks is mainly utilized
for recommendations. Actual applications of SNA is done by a few
companies and consultants like Rob Cross, IBM, Orgnet or Visiblepath.
These companies try to uncover the informal networks within
organisations to improve knowledge sharing, initiate change or bridging
silos.
The CCA has posted a link to this neat animated GIF showing, state-by-state, the occupant of the White House's approval rating. This wouldn't be hard for a newspaper to do, and it's easily updated.
The Changing Red-Blue Map Published Sunday, March 19, 2006 by CCAer | E-mail this post
Following
the 2000 and 2004 U. S. presidential elections, the red-blue divide has
frequently been talked about and mapped, so much so that the map has
become ubiquitous on the Internet (see 1, 2, 3 and so on). Radical Wit has posted an animated gif map
of the country showing George Bush’s approval ratings using the same
partisan colours as the election results maps. The map begins with the
2004 election and changes every five seconds to the next month. Maps of
individual maps are also available as static images.
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