• Debategraph
  “Debategraph lets us visualize and share networks of thought – making our reasoning transparent and open to collaborative and iterative reflection, questioning and improvement.”
• The Open Data Handbook
  “This handbook introduces you to the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially useful for those working with government data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data – why to go open, what open is, and the how to do open.”
• Wrangl – Make sense of the arguments for and against
  A neat debate visualisation tool made by Stef Lewandowski to clearly show arguments for and against a topic you choose.
• The Digital Engagement Guide | Ideas and practical help to use digital and social media in the public sector
  A great set of resources, guides and ideas pulled together by Steph Gray of Helpful Technology
• Visualising Advocacy | Drawing by Numbers
  Tactical Tech’s new project on data visualisation tools and processes for activism and advocacy
  
• The Periodic Table of Content
  Practical, neat visual explaining different content types, what they are for and the effort required to create them.
• Kaggle and Crowdsourcing Data Modeling
  “Kaggle is an innovative solution for statistical/analytics outsourcing. We are the leading platform for predictive modeling competitions. Companies, governments and researchers present datasets and problems – the world’s best data scientists then compete to produce the best solutions. At the end of a competition, the competition host pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model.”
• UX Myths
  “Build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs! UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true.”
• Nesta Innovation in Giving
  Microsite bringing together the stories of the organisations and ideas supported through the Innovation in Giving Fund.
• Timeline
  “Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use.” You’ll need a bit of coding ability, as well as good content selection choices, but this tool can help you present effective stories. I think this could be a nice way to present a CV or an organisation’s progress.

See more of my bookmarks on delicious.

The idea behind the group is to “reflect your week [and] Think about something which has been either newsworthy to you or newsworthy to others this week – […] a special moment or take a snap which reflects the story of the week.”

Personally, I’ve taken to the second part of it, trying to document one special or interesting (to me) event, moment or idea each week.

Joining up to the group has given me a welcome creative jumpstart. Knowing I will contribute a photo each week makes me think a little more carefully about what photos I take. The process also makes me consciously look out for interesting things to photograph, pay more attention to composition and has forced me to get to know my photography apps better (using an iPhone 4s).

It’s also nice to know that I’m creating some kind of photo diary that I can look back on, and print, at the end of 2012. I hope to see positive memories and that my photography skills have improved over the year.

Here are the photos I’ve taken so far:

Featured photo at the top of this post: in the crowd at Black Stone Cherry, 14th March 2012

The garden at the new house is a long, narrow area filled with gravel with a high brick wall running the length of the right-hand side. It’s empty; a blank canvas. Opportunity abounds to try things out.

It’s going to be split into sections, all still connected, with one area a place to experiment with some ideas inspired by Japanese gardens (particularly Helena Atlee’s The Gardens of Japan). Here’s a flavour:

Photo: Red azalea by bridge by –char–

Photo: Japanese garden, Kew Gardens by Sebastian Crump

Photo: Tree in Middle Flass Lodge by Gavin Wray

To cover up some boring creosoted overlapping fence panels, and liven things up with vibrant colour, I’d like to make visual panels using torn up paper from Japanese magazines. The more colourful, vibrant and bubbly, the better. Big fonts, bright blues, reds, pinks and whites, landscapes, rural scenes, technology, gadgetry – the whole caboodle. While stumbling for inspiration, I found some brilliant collage work by Shigeo Sato, such as this live painting:

[ Africa Africa ] – Live Painting, 100 x 80 cm on canvas, © 2009 Shigeo Sato

Now I realise these vibrant colours, patterns and collages create an abrasive feel – the opposite of the peaceful, contemplative atmosphere you would typically associate with a Japanese garden. But, hey, I fancy having a go at it and think it could add some interest and some colour, making some interesting backgrounds behind the plants and trees.

The panels will be old wardrobe doors, 140cm x 56cm:

After gluing the paper to the panel, the idea is to use something like boat varnish to seal the collage, making it watertight and suitable for displaying outside.

Phew, that’s a long post. I’m thinking that if I write about it here, in public, then that means I will actually make the thing, rather than just talk about it.

Next – to source lots of magazines with colourful adverts and images that I can use in the collage. Do you know where I could find a stash of magazines that might be suitable? Maybe you have a box in your loft that you want to get rid of?

Apparently, I have a geeky grin, post more positive than negative tweets, wear techie t-shirts and am possibly obsessed with football. Woo, uncanny! They got the quiff right too.

Discover your Twitter character on visual.ly.

This post is a quick test of the Meegloo WordPress plugin, which enables you to embed your stream – the collated text, audio, video and photo updates – into a post. I’m posting to the stream via an iPad and iPhone and just seeing what happens.

You get a nice bar chart summarising your traits by how much more, or less than, they differ from the average on Twitter.

You also get more detailed descriptions of individual traits, what they mean and your score:

TweetPsych returns scores for the following traits or content – this list is ordered by my reported traits, from more than average to lower than average:

1. Positive sentiment (42%)
2. Learning and education (35%)
3. Past (7%)
4. Primordial (6%)
5. Constructive (3%)
6. Future (-3%)
7. Anxiety (-5%)
8. Control (-5%)
9. Senses (-7%)
10. Social (-7%)
11. Media (-11%)
12. Conceptual (-12%)
13. Time (-18%)
14. Work (-25%)
15. Self Reference (-30%)
16. Present (-30%)
17. Negative (-30%)
18. Money (-33%)
19. Thinking (-36%)
20. Numbers (-37%)

The report is a snapshot in time – today – though I’m not sure how far back TweetPsych analyses my Twitter history.

After experiencing fantastic recent months, a great summer, with lots of new things happening, I thought it might be interesting to compare today’s scores with another set of scores at some point in the future, so I saved the results in this spreadsheet. It might be interesting to see if any traits score differently.

I’ve started a new job at Podnosh, a consultancy run by Nick Booth providing training, development and strategy to local councils, public bodies, charities, housing associations, neighbourhood groups and active citizens. The work is varied. Some of the things I’m working on include:

• Training workshops for community groups to learn social reporting.
• Management and support for clients’ websites (using WordPress Multisite).
• Assisting with event coordination such as SpeedData, a collaboration between Podnosh and Substrakt, a digital media and design agency.
• Coordinating the monthly central Birmingham social media surgery for voluntary and community groups.
• Creating content for blogs.

On the freelance front, I’ve just updated the portfolio with a recent WordPress theme design for Dirty Bristow magazine.

View full size image (jpg, 1.6mb) | View on flickr

Here’s how I made it…

Overview

1. Get the listening data from the last.fm API.
2. Turn the data into a form suitable for importing into Google Spreadsheets.
3. Visualise the data in a tree map.
4. Overlay the photos on the tree map.

Get listening data from last.fm API

I use last.fm to store data about my listening habits. Any track I listen to on my iPod, iTunes, Spotify or the last.fm website itself, is “scrobbled” – collected on my computer using the scrobbler tool and sent to my profile on last.fm.

You can access your data using the last.fm API (you’ll need to sign up for an API key, if you haven’t already done so). You get the data by submitting a request (i.e. typing the address in a web browser) to:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/

…and appending a method, your API key and (if you want) a time period.

To get the data about the top artists I listened to in 2010, I used the getTopArtists method:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=user.gettopartists
&user=denituthered&period=12month&api_key=myAPIKey

This returns the data as XML, which looks something like this:

<lfm status="ok">
  <topartists user="denituthered" type="12month"
page="1" perPage="50" totalPages="12" total="596">
    <artist rank="1">
      <name>Left Lane Cruiser</name>
      <playcount>179</playcount>
      <mbid/>
      <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Left+Lane+Cruiser</url>
      <streamable>1</streamable>
      <image size="small">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/34/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="medium">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/64/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="large">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/126/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="extralarge">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/252/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="mega">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/500/13235587/Left+Lane+Cruiser+LLC.jpg</image>
    </artist>

    <artist rank="2">
      <name>Otis Taylor</name>
      <playcount>165</playcount>
      […]
    </artist>

    <artist rank="3">
      <name>Black Stone Cherry</name>
      <playcount>165</playcount>
      […]
    </artist>

  </topartists>
</lfm>

Get the data ready for Google Spreadsheets

I wanted to get my data into Google Spreadsheets to use the visualisation tools. However, XML isn’t a supported file format in Google Spreadsheets, so I couldn’t just throw my XML file up there and start visualising. So, I needed to turn my XML into a format suitable for Google Spreadsheets, such as a CSV file.

You can do this with some recent versions of Excel or other Office tools. I needed something free and used Google Refine. It’s handy for cleaning up data and exporting data into different formats.

I opened the XML file in Google Refine and deleted some of the extraneous columns and rows leaving just the following fields (as column titles):

• Rank
• Artist
• Playcount
• Image URL

I then saved the data as a CSV file and uploaded it to Google Spreadsheets. Here’s the file.

Visualise the data

To get the basic layout of the visualisation I created a tree map. In Google Spreadsheets:

1. I selected the required data fields (Artist and Playcount).
2. Chose Insert > Gadget > Tree Map Gadget.
3. Placed the tree map in a new sheet.

View full size image (png, 66kb)

The tree map recalculates itself when you change your browser window dimensions. I wanted to make a visualisation with dimensions approximately A4 landscape, and changed the window dimensions until I got a tree map layout that felt right.

Overlay the photos

I took a screenshot of the tree map, opened it in Pixelmator (any image editor will do) and then increased the image dimensions by 50% to create a larger image to work with.

The last.fm data contains URLs for image files. I did use some of these though, where there were odd shapes in the tree map, I looked around for suitable images that would work well in extreme letterbox or elongated shapes.

The final stage involved getting the photo for each artist and cropping the photo to the same dimensions as the underlying shape in the tree map.

So, I started with Left Lane Cruiser and Otis Taylor at the top left of the visualisation and then worked my way through the other artists.

This is the final result:

Here’s the finished visualisation (jpg, 1.6mb) | View on flickr

The first is a new website for Ken Hawkins Photography, which involved visual design, building a bespoke WordPress theme and assisting Ken in using the WordPress admin site to edit his photo galleries and blog.

For the second project, I helped Jon Bounds with layout and design work to produce the Christmas-o-meter. This is a fun site that rates the cheeriness of Twitter users based on comparing the sentiment of their recent tweets against a database of words with emotional value.

Read the interview »