data vis for transylvania dh
TRANSCRIPT
Visualisation and Storytelling
Shawn Day
Transylvania Digital Humanities Centre / 30 April /1 May 2015
Objective(s)‣ To build on the Visualisation introduced by Vinayak; ‣ To appreciate the connections between time and space and
how visualising data with these attributes benefits from a visual perspective;
‣ Through quick overview of four recently introduced tools that can enable analysis and presentation of scholarly research using temporal and spatial tools;
‣ To engage in free and informal discussion about how these might be employed in your own research;
‣ Inspire and Imagine.
Just so You Know Where I am Coming From‣ Lecture in DH and Manage MA in Digital Arts and
Humanities at University College Cork ‣ Coordinate Digital Humanities between Library, Institute
for Collaborative Research in the Humanities and Schools at Queen’s University Belfast
‣ Lecture in Computer Science / Social Computing Trinity College Dublin
‣ Formerly Managed the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin
My Research‣ Social, Economic and Medical History ‣ Specifically ‣ “The Geography of Vice and Drinking” ‣ “Asylum Admittance as a Chosen Survival Strategy” ‣ “Transatlantic Cultural Transfer - Respectful
Communities”
‣ Co-Chair of Space-Time Working Group of NeDIMAH ‣ Member of Information Visualisation Committee of
Case Study: Using a Tree Map to Find Data
Example: Panopticon
Ben Scheiderman and Hard Drive Space
Example: Bachelor’s Degrees 2011
Ben Schmidt, 2013 http://benschmidt.org/Degrees/2011Overview/
Case Study: Occupations of Politicians‣ What are we studying? • Self-declared occupations of politicians
‣ Why? • What bias might they bring to their job?
‣ How? • Visualising past occupation and mapping to political
platform of party affiliated with
Occupations of MPs in the 2nd Canadian Parliament
Occupations of MPs in the 37th Canadian Parliament
The Result/ New Patterns‣ The emergence of the professional politician with no
private sector experience ‣ Occupational continuity across changes in governing
party ‣ http://shawnday.com/research/TreeChart.html
How Else Could this be Done?
The Value of Data Vis for Analysis‣ New ways of presenting allow new ways of seeing ‣ Hidden patterns become evident ‣ Suggest other hypotheses to test for ‣ Good research raises more questions than answers
People demanding more…‣ Interactivity ‣ Involvement ‣ Action ‣ Participation ‣ Web 2.0 … 3.0 …. ‣ Organic Co-Creation ‣ Criticality
‣ McCandless on Data Journalism - The Power of the Visual
Visualising (and Making) Large Collections Accessible‣ 170,000 images from 1938-1945 ‣ Life in America during the Great Depression and WWII ‣ Yale University DH
Case Study: The Time Strip
Visualisation Objective‣ Exploring the ‘ordinary’ lives of rural pioneers/farmers in
nineteenth century Ontario
Canada
Ontario
South Western Ontario
Farm Journal Raw Materials‣ 100s of pages ‣ Varying hands ‣ Varying quality ‣ Columns ‣ No Context
William Sunter Farm Diary, 1858
Medical Diary by BlueChillies
Example: Medical Diary
History flow by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas
Example: History Flow
Processing1.Digitisation 2.Text Capture 3.Quality Control 4.Generate word frequency (Voyant, TAPoR) 5.Entity Recognition and Tagging 6.Isolate known farm activities (NLP - LanguageWare) 7.Collocate to link activity references to time, duration, and resources (Voyant)
Digitisation
Text Capture and Quality Control
Entity Recognition and Analysis
http://new.opencalais.com/opencalais-demo/
The Result/ New Patterns
The Result/ New Patterns‣ Less time haying ‣ The impact of technology ‣ More tasks faster
How Else Could this be done?
What is the Value of this Visualisation?‣ Easier to compare over intervals ‣ Multiple vectors with greater granularity in a compressed
space ‣ The challenge is to find rich enough source materials to
yield substantive datasets
Lev Manovich - Software Studies‣ the discipline of data visualisation still rests on practices and forms
developed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‣ Seeing everything at once and navigating, aggregating, processing ‣ Simplify trends by throwing away data to allow for comparative study
– discarding 90% of data to allow us to compare 10%. Manovich has adopted a distinctly different process that asks us to wonder how different things may look when we attempt to work with complete datasets.
‣ Social Media as a playground - Seeing What Others See
A Collection of Images
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Impressions of Impressionists
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/
TextPatterns (Reading Entirety)
Anna Karenina Lev2
https://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3385282867/in/album-72157615900916808/
Visualising Time and SpaceThe NeDIMAH Journey and Some New Tools
A Little NeDIMAH Background‣ Objectives: ‣ Knowledge Transfer through focussed sharing of Methods
and Techniques ‣ Identification of Best Practice through Case Studies ‣ Identification and Documentation of Issues facing DH
Scholars in Geospatial and Temporal practise ‣ Established STWG Wiki at inception and used for specific ST
use
NeDIMAH Space and Time‣ Draw together past findings in themes:
‣ Place + Time = Events ‣ Combined with Tools and Methodologies ‣ To explore Networks as conjunctions
Outcomes‣ Other than mapping the ecosystem: people, tools,
methods…
‣ Fluidity ‣ Ambiguity ‣ Standards and Gazetteers ‣ Next Big Thing: Capture Momentum, Velocity, Fluidity,
Trajectory and Intensity In Space and Time
Agenda‣ What is TimelineJS? How is it Being Used? ‣ What is JuxtaposeJS? How is it Being Used? ‣ What is StoryMapJS? How is it Being Used? ‣ What is Story Map? How is it Being Used? ‣ Strengths, Weaknesses & InterOperability ‣ Discussion
First: Let’s Give Something a Try!‣ Social Media enabled - Instagram
snapmap.knightlab.com
So What?
An Intriguing Intersection
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Knight Lab - Northwestern University‣ the Lab makes technology that aims to help make
information meaningful and promotes quality storytelling on the Internet.
‣ technologists, journalists, designers and educators ‣ news media innovation through exploration,
experimentation
Problem‣ Journalism is still struggling with its digitally-focused
future. Technologists are winning at media technology innovation, but they do not understand “journalism.” Worse, many journalists barely understand how the Internet works, let alone how to get the most out of storytelling on the web.
‣ Enter Knight Lab ‣ 8 faculty, 20 + students and 7 staff members
ESRI
ESRI‣ Esri inspires and enables people to positively impact the
future through a deeper, geographic understanding of the changing world around them.
‣ ARCGIS is arguably the deficit standard for Geographic Information Systems in the world today
‣ Proprietary but very Education friendly
Timeline JS
timeline.knightlab.com
Timeline JS‣ TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to
build visually,rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet.
‣ Experts can use their JSON skills to create custom installations, while keeping TimelineJS's core look and functionality.
‣ It can pull in media from a variety of sources and has built-in support for Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more.
TimelineJS‣ What’s it based on? ‣ What does it do? ‣ How can I use it? ‣ What do I need to use it?
TimeLineJS Case Study‣ Is it graphically pleasing? ‣ Do you know what it is about? ‣ Have you worked with anything like this?
Ingredients for Timeline JS‣ A Google Drive Account ‣ An Online Storage Space for Media ‣ Data ‣ Start and End Dates ‣ Headline ‣ Content ‣ Text ‣ Media
‣ A Conceptual Map
A Recipe for Use (1)
A Recipe for Use (2)
A Recipe for Use (3)
A Recipe for Use (4)
What’s Cool?‣ Knight Labs provides a Wizard and Templates; ‣ Can Embed in your own web page; ‣ Can Embed in a WordPress Blog (Plug-In); ‣ Can choose from a variety of Map Appearances; ‣ Can create a unique and persistent URL; ‣ You can modify appearance as you gain familiarity; ‣ Data is stored on your own service in your own space; ‣ It’s OpenSource.
Tips & tricks1.Keep it short, and write each event as a part of a larger
narrative.
2.Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline (that’s what Storymap JS is for).
3.Include events that build up to major occurrences — not just the major events.
Alternatives
Juxtapose JS‣ JuxtaposeJS helps storytellers compare two pieces of
similar media, including photos, and gifs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (grown of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.).
‣ It is free, easy to use, and works on all devices. All you need to get started are links to the images you'd like to compare.
Juxtapose JS‣ What’s it based on? ‣ What does it do? ‣ How can I use it? ‣ Who is using it? ‣ What do I need to use it?
Fukashima Nuclear Plant Disaster
Ingredients‣ Satellite Imagery from Different Times ‣ An Online Storage Space for Media ‣ A Conceptual Map for what you want to convey
The Recipe (1)
The Recipe (2)
What’s Cool?‣ It’s OpenSource - You can get the code and go mad with it; ‣ Works well with mobile devices; ‣ Tells a compelling story without words.
Storymap JSstorymap.knightlab.com
StoryMapJS‣ Javascript-based ‣ What does it do? ‣ How can I use it? ‣ Whos is using it? ‣ What else does this? ‣ What do I need to use it?
What is Gigapixel?
What do you need to use Storymap JS‣ A Google account; ‣ Shareable, rich media: ‣ Flickr, ‣ YouTube, ‣ Vimeo, ‣ Twitter ‣ Wikipedia, etc. ‣ A concept/story map
Recipe (1)
Recipe (2)
Recipe (3)
Recipe (4)1
2
3
4 5
Recipe (5)
Recipe (6)
Recipe (7)
A Stunning Example by one of my BAs
A Stunning Example by one of my BAs
What’s Cool about Storymap JS‣ It’s OpenSource; ‣ Easy to use; ‣ Can Deploy on your own site; ‣ Easily deployed into a blog; ‣ Your own your own data.
Tips and Tricks‣ Some browsers work better than others for editing; ‣ It’s trying to do a lot in your browser - watch what you
have running alongside; ‣ It’s evolving - always test before showing - new features,
but also new implementations of things you might take for granted;
ESRI Story Mapshttp://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/?fromScratch
What is Story Map Tour‣ A user experience for place-based narratives ‣ The Story Map Tour app is ideal when you want to
present a linear, place-based narrative featuring images or videos. Each “story point” in the narrative is geo-located. Users have the option of clicking sequentially through the narrative, or they can browse by interacting with the map or using the thumbnail carousel.
ESRI Story Map‣ Where’s It from? ‣ What’s it based on? ‣ What does it do? ‣ How can I use it? ‣ Whos is using it? ‣ What else does this? ‣ What do I need to use it?
EnterTainMaps
Making ESRI Story Maps‣ Tutorial: http://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/app-list/map-
tour/tutorial/
ESRI Map Story Step (1)
ESRI Map Story Step (2)
ESRI Map Story Step (3)
ESRI Map Story Step (4)
ESRI Map Story Step (5)
ESRI Map Story Step (6)
ESRI Map Story Step (7/8)
What’s Cool about Story Maps Tour‣ Very robust; ‣ Well supported; ‣ Industrial Strength ‣ Versatile
Summarising‣ Neatline ‣ Verité TimeLine ‣ Exhibit
‣ Flexibility ‣ Level of Development ‣ Cost ‣ Data Sharing
‣ Timeline JS ‣ Juxtapose JS ‣ Storymap JS ‣ ESRI Story Map Tour
