Tim’s spinning circles! In OpenProcessing! Awesome!
Archive for March, 2008
Couldn’t find the chance to talk about the sister project of OpenVisuals, OpenProcessing.org I developed last week. Basically, it is a exhibition space for Processing Community. Before giving details about the project, here is a test of the ‘embed applet’ feature in OpenProcessing. Gives you the ability to embed any of the works in OpenProcessing to your blogs, website, etc..
So below is a piece from Tim Stutts at OpenProcessing.
I was able to put myVillage visualization to OpenVisuals.org. Things look fine, except that because of the size limitation at OpenVisuals.org, the lines don’t look smooth. Here is the link: http://www.openvisuals.org/visuals/?visualID=117
yesterday, I guess for no reason, I started working on this visualization called myVillage&ITP. I am trying to visualize and also generate some kind of artsy piece out of where the people of ITP spend their time most often, and how they would walk to this place and come back to ITP.
The idea is, you go and click to a place that you have been. The guy in the application goes to that point and turns back to ITP on the google map screen shot, leaving a trace behind. I am going to put it on the floor to collect real data, but till then, here are some screen shots with random points clicked, and the emergence of the patterns through out time (shown without the map).
Just a beautiful side of visualizations, it was very interesting for me to see that the auto-random-wandering guy never crosses Greene Street and Mercer Street. First, I though it was some kind of bug, but then I figured out that, seriously, we don’t need to cross these two streets since the places one would go from ITP are either below or above these two streets; we never need to cross these streets if we are turning back to ITP.
In fact, creating the algorithm for the guy to find its way through the streets to reach its destination had been quite tricky, and kept me awake till 5am this morning (oops, daylight saving time.. so I guess it was 6am when I was in bed). But simply, the algorithm is:
the boy (boy.class) checks the adjacent corners and its own corner to see which corner is closer to the destination point
if it is the corner he is currently at
go to destination point directly
if it is not/if an adjacent corner is closer
go to that corner
I loved this piece, and trying to get it work as an applet on the webpage. Then it will be up for you guys to try.
In response to the final chapter in Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, questions on OpenVisuals coming to my mind are:
Why a user should spend time on being a part of OpenVisuals? This also brings more complicated questions: why she should spend time tweaking her visualizations with the API? Will she be interested enough to make her visualization working on the website?
I have this given as the mission in the front page :
OpenVisuals aims to provide an Open Source Visualization Framework, in which the datasets can find their own visualizations, and visualizations already out there can be shared to be used with other datasets. Dataset owners and Visualization artists - datasets and visualizations - in the same pot.
I wonder how it stands with respect to Linus Torvalds’s proposal for Linux - a new but small operating system, undertaken principally as a way to learn together -.
improving communications as group activity - “suggest a visualization to this dataset” feature, “post this dataset to the ’singles’ wall”
In reference to the section of Caterina Fake, greeting first ten thousand users in flickr, I did have my first registered user, but there is nothing I can do to greet him. He didn’t post any visualizations/assets, hence nothing to comment on. So getting a user registered gives them just an empty portfolio page. So I guess something is missing here.
On small/large groups issue, the initial idea is having a large group interaction within OpenVisuals. But since last week, I have been trying to implement a way to get future Nature of Code applications to be posted and gathered to have a small group interaction. It wasn’t the way I was looking for, but this opportunity of Nature of Code class posting their stuff itself questioned some small group interaction in the website? Can Nature of Code class students have their own space in the website? My current solution for that is to having them to tag their stuff with Nature of Code, so that in the browse page they can focus on Nature of Code works. (actually, I even added rss function, so that they can subscribe to the feed of that tag)
Here are great four questions Clay is expecting us to answer every week. And here are my very first answers about what’s going on:
- What did you do last week?
- I implemented that tagging function for visualizations, so any visualization uploaded can be tagged (not sure about datasets yet). Using these tags in the database, I created the new browsing page, which a user is able to search the visualizations through tags. I am going to replace the browse url soon, but till then, the url is www.openvisuals.org/browse/index2.php, otherwise it is www.openvisuals.org/browse
- I also implemented some security measures, because I had a user who found out the way the delete all the visualizations and datasets within the website (and took the related action, of course). This had been an interesting issue because it disproved one of my assumptions; I was thinking that till a website starts getting an amount of users, the developers don’t necessarily need to spend time on dealing the security of the website and database (preventing users to access some functions). I was thinking it could be a secondary priority.
- Actually, after I saw some user was deleting all the assets from the website, before implementing the security stuff, I implemented logging. I wanted to observe how he was behaving. I was able to log his deletion in the morning of March 1st. Then I took that portion of the logging table, and posted in openvisuals as a dataset. Maybe I can visualize it one day..
- What do you intend to do next week?
- I am going to attend the Nature of Class, thought by Daniel Shiffman, on Wednesday, and I will present OpenVisuals to the students of that class. They are working on quite interesting processing applications, any of which can be a visualization candidate. I will invite them to use OpenVisuals to upload their applications, share it with their friends through the website. OpenVisuals API is not ready yet, so I am not going to ask them to play with it, unless I can achieve to post a stable version of the API.
- I am going to work on API, and going to convert couple of my processing applications to visualizations using API, and upload them to the website.
- I will think about not storing the datasets issue.
- I will try to put the reference page up, explaining the functions of API.
- Any recent concerns and unexpected obstacles
- one of my concerns is the datasets. Currently storing the datasets within the website brings many issues:
- Uploading datasets requires a good troubleshooting feature, because csv files might not be properly setup, field types (text, date, integer, etc.) is a messy thing to deal with, and some couple of more technical issues.
- It makes OpenVisuals a rival with Swivel, Many Eyes. One of my principles reminds me that ‘every competition brings opportunity for collaboration’. I started thinking on making OpenVisuals just a visualization counterpart of Swivel and Many Eyes, which the datasets from these websites can be integrated into OpenVisuals and be used with the visualizations within. So that those websites deal with the datasets part, OpenVisuals deal with the visualization part.
- one of my concerns is the datasets. Currently storing the datasets within the website brings many issues:
- Any recent insights and surprises
- I have implemented Google Analytics and I am excited to observe user behavior through the website.
- I started to question the dataset thing on another aspect. When I look at the visualizations around, their source are not necessarily data tables. Take the visualization of Lance Armstrong’s last tour, its source is hard to have on an excel table. There are many examples like that. Will OpenVisuals include such visualizations, and if so, how some other person can use his own source (not dataset in this case)?
- I had one non-ITP, non-New Yorker user registered already. It is nice to have an interested person, although nothing in the website is in shape. I searched him on google, and he come out to be a visualization artist. This makes me smile :)
- I had an attacker. This also makes me smile. His attack was quite a nice user feedback indeed.
- In a google search of “open source visualization”, OpenVisuals shows up in the second page. This is quite nice too, considering the very limited number of hits (hence its popularity) it is currently taking.