Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation. Parallax uses faceted navigation to make it easy to jump from one set of data to another related set of data and see the underlying connections.

David’s demo gets the idea across best:

I spent some time using Parallax to explore the influence node on Freebase, which attempts to capture the influences of notable people (and has led to some fun apps). Here are some of James Joyce’s biggest influences, mapped by place of birth:

Anyone who’s spent time puzzling over Finnegans Wake knows that Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher/historian/rhetorician/etymologist/jurist whom Joyce said made his imagination grow. But who influenced Vico? Here’s a timeline of those responsible:

There’s more to explore where that came from.

Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry:

Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Each of these games uses language not as an abstraction, the purely rational product of the mind, but as quite literally a material object to be manipulated and moved, cut-up and combined.

The Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, or the Five-fold Thought-ring of the German Language, is a database of the German language composed of five predicate variables: prefixes (forty-eight values), initial letters or diphthongs (fifty values), medial letters (twelve values), final letters of diphthongs (120 values) and suffixes (twenty-four values). Instead of using a table structure, however, each variable is inscribed along the edge of a disc and nested with each of the other discs, forming a simple combinatory mechanism that can generate any information stored in the database.

This “alphabet of human thoughts” remained an undercurrent in Leibniz’s philosophy throughout his life, manifesting itself in a number of different plans: his dream for a networked encyclopedia in which, through linking, every entry was a microcosm of the human macrocosm (see Selcer 29); his lingua characteristica, or notation system for concepts “whose signs or characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers” (Leibniz 222); even his notion of “monads—discrete, irreducible primitives that nonetheless reflect the infinity of the spiritual cosmos. More specifically, Leibniz develops his “alphabet” through account of a mathesis universalis, a universal system for storing and generating knowledge.

“The verbal and visual tropes that surround the alphabet cloak the fact that the unit of textual meaning—the letter—lacks meaning itself.”

Here’s an XL view courtesy of the Etsy API.

We just need better ways of sharing, organizing, displaying and discovering these things (working on it!).

Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle word clouds we see all too often. They have a blessedly simple API as well.

ReadTheStimulus.org has made the full text of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (House Stimulus Bill) searchable with comments for each page enabled. Actual dollar appropriations from the bill have been parsed out by volunteers and entered into a Google spreadsheet. Their tagline says it all: “$850 Billion, 941 pages, and counting… somebody needs to read it!”

The Legislative Lookup API from Mobile Commons is a database that matches latitude and longtitude with the U.S. congressional and state legislators for that location. Could be put to good use in your pet mapping application. They even made it available as a standalone Rails app.

Represent from The New York Times is the kind of application you could use the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API for. It’s a nice way for New Yorkers to find their elected representatives and see what they’re up to.

The New York Times Congress API is what actually powers Represent (Represent!). The great thing about it is that it was built to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can use it with the seven-character code used to identify members of Congress in the official Biographical Directory, or the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack to individual member responses.

DC Bikes is another example of a good local application, mapping bike routes, bike thefts and bike-related Craiglist postings for Washington, D.C. bikers. It uses the same Mapnik toolkit EveryBlock uses to get their nice maps. Built by Development Seed for the D.C. Data Catalog’s Apps for Democracy competition.

iLive.at also came out of Apps for Democracy. Enter a Washington, D.C. address and receive information tailored to that location and organized into categories like Errands, Emergencies, Recently Reported Crimes, People, Transportation and “Did You Know?” I would love to see a New York version.

You can keep up with all the action in this space on the Open Government, PoliParse and Sunlight Labs Google Groups.

(Gratuitous Picture of Your Book Shelf Sunday)

Annotated on Flickr.

Good data on micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship around the world is hard to come by. There’s the World Bank’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Database, but it has more caveats than a prescription drug commercial. Different governments operating in different economies at different stages of development have different definitions for these things. The 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey comes close, “striving to define a unit of measurement, source of information, and concept of entrepreneurship applicable and available among the diverse countries surveyed.” This limits it to the “formal sector”—small companies registered with their governments—as opposed to the informal sector, like most sellers on Etsy. Still, it’s of some interest. Above, a screenshot of the Many Eyes bubble chart version of some of the data, with nations sized according to “new business density,” or the density of new registered companies per 1,000 citizens. New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, the UK and the Netherlands round out the top five. See the same data on a map here.

See also: Etsy and the World Economic Forum.

But where to start on Etsy? The Gift Guides can be a good entryway. Here’s an Etsy Mini (widget) of the Gift Guide for Her:

When you’re done there, you might be ready to pledge to buy handmade this year.

Last weekend in Providence I ended up checking out bits and pieces of Interrupt 2008, a festival co-hosted by Brown and RISD on “language-driven digital art,” and seeing a lot of old familiar faces. I actually find it comforting that the genre hasn’t changed much in the last ten years, and the low-tech aesthetic embraced by self-conscious net artists in the ’90s seems even more fitting today.

Christiane Paul, who introduced me to this scene back then, introduced concrete poet Marko Niemi at one event. His work reminds me of this quote from Kenneth Goldsmith about the web being the perfect medium for concrete poetry. He even runs a sort of Finnish Ubuweb called Nokturno.

Seoul-based Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries were the stars of the festival however. If you’re not familar with their animated Monaco-font text narratives set to jazz, I recommend Cunnilingus in North Korea (which Harper’s once tried to republish) and Beckett’s Bounce. They take a Warhol-like stance on the endeavor, saying they have no thoughts whatsoever on net art and no idea why they do what they do. Regardless, they’re huge now, exhibiting in museums around the world and enjoying a high-roller art-star lifestyle.

Both Niemi and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries started out as translators. They produce work in a number of languages with Young-hae Chang focused on English as a global dialect that is “up for grabs these days.” In an interview posted the other day on Nettime, they call English “a powerful political and cultural tool for people around the world.” In another interview: “Distance, homelessness, anonymity and insignificance are all part of the internet literary voice, and we welcome them.”