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Global flow map of $ in the FIFA scandal.  USC x UCLA collaboration. http://thefieldsofgreen.com/2015/06/19/fifa-infographic/

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LA Times does a good job mapping out SWITRS ped and bike crash data for Northeast LA. http://graphics.latimes.com/northeast-la-bike-pedestrian-accidents/

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One can never grow tired of these stylized map "shaders".  Map tiles take longer to load, but worth the wait.  The fact that this is generated on-the-fly is mindblowing. https://www.mapbox.com/blog/space-station-earth/

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Place Pulse - César A. Hidalgo / MIT Media Lab (2010) People's perceived safety of an area based on Google Street View photos.  Ingenious. http://www.fastcoexist.com/3015746/visualized/can-you-tell-how-dangerous-a-neighborhood-is-from-just-a-picture There is a mention of the Broken Windows Theory, and Giulani's Zero-tolerance approach to crime.  I believe the zero tolerance policy towards petty crime started started a few generations prior during Ed Koch's mayorship.  Malcolm Gladwell provides a good summary on the NY crime epidemic of that era in his Tipping Point book. I remember coming across this original project a few months ago, I am glad to see a research paper has come along to summarize the findings.   They've used the same Javascript Sparklines for their miniature "trending" charts that our students employed in their projects for this summer's class.

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Conflicted Phonemes (2012) - Lawrence Abu Hamdan I came across this project due to a fleeting thumbnail in the printed version of the Chicago Tribune.  There is not enough mention of this project online, so I felt compelled to post about it. Across Europe, immigration departments have a triage procedure in which a person’s accent is analyzed in order to validate their eligibility for asylum. In this case, the artist attempted to visualize the Forensic Speech Analysis which is conducted by a Swedish company (subcontracted by the Dutch government) on Somali asylum seekers' voices.  They decide whether you'll be allowed to emigrate based on your accent.

By scrutinizing phonemes, the smallest linguistic unit which conveys meaning, "officials" try to accurately determine the asylum seekers' place of origin.  According to the artists who have illustrated this process, it is not always effective.

The voice maps show which people or places have had the strongest effect on the speaker's accent.   The simple, stark black and white design of the voice maps only adds to an already powerful commentary. http://neromagazine.it/magazine/index.php?c=articolo&idart=1078&idnum=42&num=32 The larger, more colorful image in the photoset is Lisa Cooley's rendition of this project.  High quality PDF >> http://www.jannaullrich.de/popup/conflicted/Conflicted_Phonemes_LawrenceAbuHamdan_JannaUllrich.pdf

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JS.LA July Meetup - Hosted by HUGE Chris Mendez demonstrated Geotunes - the "world's largest index of place songs".  He also discussed the product development cycle and the efforts to get approved as a Spotify plugin.

Geotunes started as road trip app, intended to find music to listen to that was relevant to the place you're currently passing through.  It uses a modified D3.js geographical map as the base layer, and employs MongoDB and AWS in the backend, along with PHP and Javascript. The Spotify submission process (to get approved as a plugin) took about 7 months and it involved the following stages:

Concept - idea pitch

UX/Prototype - wireframing / mockups

Quality Assurance - no sloppy code

Development - app released in agile way; ensure 99.1% runtime

Security - appropriate data collection from app user

Sam L'Ecuyer talked about the struggle to handle file uploads in the browser and the creation of his own True Type font engine.

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JS.LA July meetup - Mid City 7pm July 25th, 6100 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048

2nd Floor (Huge's offices) Chris Mendez, will talk about Geotunes, a geolocative music discovery app, and Sam L'ecuyer will demo a Javascript font engine. Highly recommended educational and networking opportunity.

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Gottfried demonstrates how to convert CSV data to a JSON array

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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time

Recently mentioned on KCRW's Which Way LA, the Passage Ride is a nighttime bike excursion through the less traveled streets, nooks and crannies of Los Angeles.

Pictured is a composite of all the routes they've ever taken.  The brighter the street, the more it's been used as part of a weekly route. http://www.thepassageride.com/Maps/Maps

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MIT Immersion project

by Adi Schlank

From the MIT Media Lab, a group of students have created Immersion, a project that allows anyone who wants to the ability to map their metadata through their Gmail account. By going to the website immersion.media.mit.edu and giving access to your Gmail account, it uses the content of your email to map out your personal and professional interactions in different perspectives. With everything done for you including retrieving the data, creating categories, and making a color scheme, the immersion project allows for “self-reflection, art, privacy, and strategy” on your network. By mapping out your email that contains a detailed description of your social interactions, you can map and plan effectively you connect with. 

Being a very simple way to see your data, I decided to do my own metadata that I found to be very revealing. The image consists of all my interactions since I opened my account and reveals all the people with circles ranging in size depending how many emails passed between us. The data furthermore allows for a closer analysis by clicking on the circles and seeing exactly when you first started to email them, last email, sent, and received. It also categorizes people into networks if they were attached to the email as well. Through my metadata, I realize I mostly email people from school or the ones I have worked with.

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Chicago bike crash heat map http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2013/Where-the-Cyclists-and-Bike-Crashes-Are-in-Chicago/ As is often expected, the increase in cyclist injuries is almost proportional to the increase of bike commuters.  Downtown areas of a city contain more destinations, and the street network is usually denser - therefore, these often show up as red on such maps. The article mentions that diagonal streets with heavy traffic could be the culprit.  Diagonal streets will have a 6-way major intersection every 1/3 of a mile.  From personal experience, a bad idea without a traffic circle.

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Project 2 movie choices.   A couple of duplicates, which means each person will focus on different visual aspects of that film.  A few animated features of different eras, some classics, a couple with heavy VFX, and a black and white flick with an over-the-top movie poster.  This will be interesting.

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Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) storyboard Turns out that the bottom row was a Diagram of Movement, a mix of pictures and musical score.  My assumption is that the line represents a rise and fall of overall excitement in each shot. http://northernyarns.tumblr.com/post/8618555210/sergi-einstein-storyboard-for-alexander-nevsky

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Strikingly similar to a Philip K Dick novel, Ubik.

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Project 1 final presentations

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Here's a recent Dice article on skills employers are looking for in Atlanta, a place with solid tech sector growth, especially in the "Wireless/Mobility" area.

Motivation behind our in-class labs is mostly practical. You will end up using a combination of these scripting languages and libraries for your final project.  But more importantly, familiarity with scripting languages such as JS and PHP, as well as relational databases will only make you a stronger candidate in the job market.

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Thematic Identity Map - In-class Critique The first class project:  A pen-and-paper basemap, ranging from geographic (street network, local neighborhood) to metaphysical (mind map), plus layers of personal information.  This was meant to divulge new information about oneself through visualization of data collected at semi-regular intervals. Data represented in these Identity Maps was collected in a time span as short as an hour, or a whole day, even up to the length of an entire school semester.  We had a varied mix of infographic styles - flow maps, time series, spatial narratives, relational charts, treemap. You name it, they mapped it:  Friend network fluctuation, Quality of inter-personal interactions, Daily activities, Attire choice based on outdoor temperature levels, Food consumption and personal nutrition,  Internet browsing history, Personal mobility, Visual resume, Monetary income and expenses. A very impressive first pass at a fairly open-ended assignment.