HCMC Blogs

April 28, 2008

First try with Bailey data in Gapminder Motion

Posted by on 28 Apr 2008 in Activity Log

Created a tab-delimited file of the records I've been using for my frequency visualization. Each of those has a unique id in the first field, so of course no trends could be presented by the software, but I could get a snapshot of the distribution of trials on the selected variables at each year.

Then decided to focus on crimes, so created a table with 1 of the 8 types of crimes in the first field of each record, then repeat for the ten years in the sample set. Then I had to aggregate the number of e.g. murders in 1790, and then work out the percentage of that number which had male for the suspect's gender, L for the jury code, age<20, age21-40, age40+ etc.

So, you can no longer get at each individual trial, but only at the group of trial which match the up to 4 attributes (2 axes, colour, size of ball) that you can filter by. That may be 1 or it may be more than 1 in a given year. On the other hand, you can now see trends e.g. for each crime, what the gender breakdown is for each year over time and how that's trending.

I'm not sure if the kind of aggregating required to get the trends will make the data useless or not yet.

Gapminder Motion data requirements

Posted by on 28 Apr 2008 in Activity Log
Gapminder Motion (a google gadget based on Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer) requires the following in a tab delimited table: first record: a string for name of field first field: a string for primary key variable value (e.g. province if you're comparing stats across provinces) second field: a number for date (I used 4-digit years, not sure what else it supports) third and subsequent fields: string values will appear in the colour drop-down and the size drop-down but not in the two axis drop-downs; numeric values appear in all drop downs. The set of primary keys is repeated for each year (or other date value). That's how the software can show the trend over time for that primary key in the variables that have been chosen in the dropdowns. I'm going to see if there is any way to manipulate the Bailey crimes data into something that is amenable to the demands of this visualization tool, and if the numbers are useful having been so massaged.

More Bios Research

Posted by on 28 Apr 2008 in Activity log
Researched more figures in the biographies, and straightened out some of my confusions about references. Added a biography for William Henry Bevis, and checked or added to several other entries.

Gapminder Motion (google gadget) working

Posted by on 28 Apr 2008 in Activity Log
Got the Google Gadget based on Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer. It's called Gapfinder Motion. There is absolutely no supporting documentation. It took me quite some time and a trip through Google's visualization api to find that the URL that the gadget needs requires "tq" as an argument rather than the "ccc" provided in the URL of the page itself. For example to address this URL successfully from the gadget: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pKaktXm-iVRpJG7BHoeNdEg&hl=en (for now this page is accessible only to me) I must enter this into the URL field in the gadget http://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?key=pKaktXm-iVRpJG7BHoeNdEg&hl=en Here's the URL for the page that allows you to specify the necessary arguments, and then generates the block of javascript code that you put into the page (I've added linebreaks to make the URL a little more manageable in the blog viewer): http://k5r309h2-a.gmodules.com/ig/creator?synd=open&; url=http%3A//www.google.com/ig/modules/motionchart.xml& pt=%26context%3Dd%26synd%3Dopen%26lang%3Den%26.lang%3Den%26country%3Dus%26.country%3Dus%26cat%3Dall%26num%3D1%26start%3D-1%26cols%3D1%26objs%3D6Ya8& sn=6Ya8&lang=en

SA: G&T +4.0 = 28.0 G&T

Posted by on 28 Apr 2008 in G&T Hours
Forgot to post last week for two very long days: Monday at TRUTH meeting in evening (+2), Wednesday doing presentation in late afternoon with Martin for RS on Spanish 100 and Hot Potatoes.

BC 58 notes: 415 done, 78 left

Posted by on 28 Apr 2008 in Activity log

Churning on through the notes. The total is diminishing slightly as marginalia are migrated into documents, and other orphaned and superceded notes are commented out. Three or four more hours should do it!

April 26, 2008

CFP--Media in Motion: The Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age, McGill, October 2008

Posted by on 26 Apr 2008 in Announcements
Call for Papers Media in Motion: The Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age October 29, 2008

McGill University Montreal, Quebec

The DOCAM (Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage) Research Alliance and Media@McGill invite submissions of abstracts for the presentation of papers at the inaugural Media in Motion Symposium. The interdisciplinary event aims to bring together graduate students across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences in order to explore the many facets of media art preservation. To that end, submissions related to the conference theme, ”The Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age,” are strongly encouraged. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Continued...
April 25, 2008