Martin's ITP Blog http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog martin @ itp @ nyu Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:16:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 en Typography and business card identity http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=348 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=348#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:16:04 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=348 For visual communication the past two weeks we have been exploring with typography and business card design. I worked on some experiment identities for my company I am doing my software work under, Emergence Studios. It is a brand new company so I have not settled on an identity. However, the topmost business card, and lower right logo, is what I am currently leaning towards, using a font called Fenwick that seems casual yet professional, modern and elegant. Some of the more computery fonts look fun for a little while, but the effect wears off over time and I am left wanting a mature look. I am currently using fenwick on the bottom of my website. The lower business card is a fenwick variation that looks like a wood-cut, fun but not versatile enough for a logo.

The studies:

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=348 Activism Week 3 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=346 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=346#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:54:31 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=346 Police Scanner: I streamed the NYPD for a while as background noise. Nothing particularly eventful. I used to carry around a police scanner while working as a photographer at a newspaper, and I seem remember it rarely or ever came in handy, except for a rare major event happens as you are listening. What I was thinking about this time was the protocol of the police radio, the formalness, directness of it and its effectiveness. Transmissions are kept short to not tie up the channel. Codes are use to eliminate the possibility of ambiguity, as well as securing access to  the information/data. It is an extremely powerful tool that we can learn a lot from in terms of group collaboration and coordination.

For the other part of the assignment, to generate my own codes, I took from what I know best, the HTTP protocol. A sort of web 2.0 trucker guide:

  • 200 - OK - Equivalent to trucker 10-4
  • 404 - Not Found - Dead end, unable to locate target
  • 304 - Not Modified - This is a way to check in, and say that things are ok
  • 409 - Conflict - There is a conflict
  • 401 - Unauthorized - Authority problems, need to talk to boss
  • 413 - Request Entity Too Large - too many of the opposition. Abort!
  • 301 - Moved Permanently - The location has to be changed
  • 101 - Switching Protocols - This means your line is bugged, switch method of communication
]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=346 Visual Communication: Bad Signs http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=340 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=340#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:09:15 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=340 We were assigned to photograph some bad signs in NYC for visual communication. Here are three examples that I found:

This one is simply an egregious abuse of typography in all possible ways.

A common NYC parking post, however once tacked on by several special cases (Farmer’s Market, Faculty Parking, School Days) it becomes difficult to solve the puzzle of when you are allowed to park there.

An example of the horrors of combining Serif and Sans-Serif fonts, as well as not have a primary element.

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=340 Visual Communication Website Analysis http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=334 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=334#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:20:20 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=334 For our Visual Communications class we were supposed to pick a website and analyse some of the design elements used, including the colors, grid system, and layout used to present the content. I chose to look a fairly standard but, in my opinion, well designed site, arstechnica.com . As a technical journal it’s main role is to present quality writing and articles, so the main focus is a simple uncluttered UI that does not distract from the content. However, within these confines, it manages to have a very solid design, with orange accents, rich black gradients, and consistently branded section headers. All of these combine to give the site a polished, professional, mature look that cements its reputation as a reputable, intelligent source of tech news.

Arstechnica Analysis Slides

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=334 Social Activism App http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=332 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=332#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:57:08 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=332 For our Social Activism and Mobile Technology course we were assigned to review of an activism app. I thought about it a while, looked around the app store, but in the end decided that the most apt app was already present on my phone, the Obama ‘08 App. Nearly a year after the election and it still has not been deleted by me. Maybe because there is something special about this app, not that the app neccessarily had any effect on the election, but by what it represented. Technology integrating with modern political organizing. Directly and literally tapping your contact list to see which friends are in swing states, based on their area codes; tapping your location to key you in on local events and gatherings. While many would (rightly) consider this invasive, for passionate organizers this kind of technology just makes people excited about the cause and desire to stay updated.

However at this point it probably needs an update to move over from the Organizing category to the To-Do List category.

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=332 Looking for iPhone or iPod Touch app testers http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=330 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=330#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:26:12 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=330 Just wanted to leave an update on here, Old Map App has developed into Historic Earth, an application that is a partnership with Historic Map Works, allowing access to their large, exclusive database of historical geo-referenced maps from around the country in various time periods.

We are preparing for a short round of testing, if you have an iPhone or iPod touch and would like to participate, just leave your info at the link below. (You will need to find your device’s UDID number, instructions are on the form)

Beta testing sign-up form

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=330 Old Map App http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=328 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=328#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 23:56:05 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=328

After several weeks of objective-C debugging, I have gotten to some documentation for my project on mobile historical urban cartography. The website for Old Map App has launched with a 2-minute screencast to introduce the app.

oldmapapp.com

Old Map App allows an iPhone user to explore the effects of time on geography and urban development.

The application displays layers of geo-referenced historical maps projected onto a modern coordinate system, so that the same location can be compared over time. Layers can be faded, adjusted, and explored freely. If the user is located with the region of the historical map, the user’s position will be mapped on the old maps to the position of the compass indicator.

Several maps of New York City & Region are included from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. All are high-resolution scans from the Library of Congress.

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=328 friend swarm http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=320 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=320#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 06:19:50 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=320 friendSwarm is an iphone application for generative social network mapping. The aim of the application is to provide a glimpse into the depth of social network data, and provide a spatial-context with which to navigate and the explore the network. The application uses facebook connect to gather the user’s social network data and visualize it as a series of interconnected physics-based nodes and tags.

The network starts as un unshaped blob, but over time the elements wiggle into clusters based on friend connections and tags:

And over time, the network calms down into an optimized form. The red tags indicate tag clusters, whose size depend on the member’s count and the closeness of their locations.

Different shapes of friend clusters indicate various degrees of inter-connectedness or separation.


]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=320 counting you-know-who http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=303 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=303#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:22:40 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=303
For our text visualization assignment I charted the occurrences in all 7 of the Harry Potter books of the three phrases, “you-know-who”, “he-who-must-not-be-named”, and “voldemort”, graphing them as lines signifying their relative position in the book. The three colors represent the three phrases, and the search was case-insensitive. Click the image above to see the high-resolution image, or see the python source code that generated it here.

]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?feed=rss2&p=303 semantic bayesian comparisons http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=287 http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=287#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:34:57 +0000 martin http://itp.nyu.edu/~mdc368/blog/?p=287 For our A-Z assignment on bayesian filtering I played around with the Open Calais api, which performs semantic language processing to identify real-life entities in text. So, I wanted to classify a few blogs/news sources, not by the actual words they use, but by the types of objects that are identified in their feeds, i.e are they talking more about people, places, objects, etc. This is the final list of all the entities open calais identified in all the feeds I gave it (their list of possible ones is much larger):

['City', 'Movie', 'MedicalTreatment', 'MedicalCondition', 'Organization', 'TVShow', 'SportsEvent', 'Holiday', 'OperatingSystem', 'Product', 'EntertainmentAwardEvent', 'ProgrammingLanguage', 'RadioProgram', 'PublishedMedium', 'ProvinceOrState', 'NaturalFeature', 'MusicGroup', 'IndustryTerm', 'URL', 'Country', 'RadioStation', 'Person', 'MusicAlbum', 'Position', 'Facility', 'Continent', 'Currency', 'EmailAddress', 'SportsGame', 'Technology', 'Company']

So I wrote a script to process feeds from 7 different blogs through open calais, and create a large dataset of the number of occurrences of the above entities in each of the feeds. After that, it was just a little data processing to get a score for each relationship between two blogs/feeds of the cumulative distance between their data sets.

The 7 feeds I chose were NYT, Gawker, Gizmodo, Fox News, People, Boing Boing, and Digg. Digg & Gizmodo were pairs, closest to Fox News was NYT, closest to NYT was Gawker, closest to People is Digg, closest to Gawker is Boing Boing, etc. Nothing terribly conclusive, no visualizations yet but some interesting data to look at.

Data file - allblogdata.csv
Data file - scores.csv

Python script - bayesian.py

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