Book by Alexandru C. Telea : “This book explores the study of processing and visually representing data sets. Data visualization is closely related to information graphics, information visualization, scientific visualization, and statistical graphics. This second edition presents a better treatment of the relationship between traditional scientific visualization and information visualization, a description of the emerging field of visual analytics, and updated techniques using the GPU and new generations of software tools and packages. This edition is also enhanced with exercises and downloadable code and data sets. See also Supplemental Material.
Plenario
About Plenario: “Plenario makes it possible to rethink the way we use open data. Instead of being constrained by the data that is accessible and usable, let’s start by formulating our questions and then find the data to answer them. Plenario makes this easy by tying together all datasets on one map and one timeline—because in the real world, everything affects everything else…
The problem
Over the past few years, levels of government from the federal administration to individual municipalities like the City of Chicago have begun embracing open data, releasing datasets publicly for free. This movement has vastly increased the amount of data available, but existing platforms and technologies are designed mainly to view and access individual datasets one at a time. This restriction contradicts decades of research contending that no aspect of the urban landscape is truly isolated; in today’s cities, everything is connected to everything else.
Furthermore, researchers are often limited in the questions they can ask by the data available to answer them. It is not uncommon to spend 75% of one’s time locating, downloading, cleaning, and standardizing the relevant datasets—leaving precious little resources for the important work.
What we do
Plenario is designed to take us from “spreadsheets on the web”1 to truly smart open data. This rests on two fundamental breakthroughs:
1) Allow users to assemble and download data from multiple, independent data sources, such as two different municipal data portals, or the federal government and a privately curated dataset.
2) Unite all datasets along a single spatial and temporal index, making it possible to do complex aggregations with one query.
2) Unite all datasets along a single spatial and temporal index, making it possible to do complex aggregations with one query.
With these advances, Plenario allows users to study regions over specified time periods using all relevant data, regardless of original source, and represent the data as a single time series. By providing a single, centralized hub for open data, the Plenario platform enables urban scientists to ask the right questions with as few constraints as possible….
being implemented by the Urban Center for Computation and Data and DataMade“
Ello
What is Ello?
“Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.
We originally built Ello as a private social network. Over time, so many people wanted to join Ello that we built a public version of Ello for everyone to use.
Ad Free
Ello doesn’t sell ads. Nor do we sell data about you to third parties.
Virtually every other social network is run by advertisers. Behind the scenes they employ armies of ad salesmen and data miners to record every move you make. Data about you is then auctioned off to advertisers and data brokers. You’re the product that’s being bought and sold.
Collecting and selling your personal data, reading your posts to your friends, and mapping your social connections for profit is both creepy and unethical. Under the guise of offering a “free” service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy.
We also think ads are tacky, that they insult our intelligence and that we’re better without them.
Read more about our no-ad policy here.
Support Ello
Ello is completely free to use.
We occasionally offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.
You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work and help us make Ello better and better….
Read the manifesto“
CityBeat: Visualizing the Social Media Pulse of the City
“CityBeat is a an academic research project set to develop an application that sources, monitors and analyzes hyper-local information from multiple social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter in real time.
This project was led by researchers at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech, in collaboration with the The New York World (Columbia Journalism School), Rutgers University, NYU, and Columbia University….
If you are interested in the technical details, we have published several papers detailing the process of building CityBeat. Enjoy your read!
Xia C., Schwartz, R., Xie K., Krebs A., Langdon A., Ting J. and Naaman M., CityBeat: Real-time Social Media Visualization of Hyper-local City Data. In Proceedings, WWW 2014, Seoul, Korea, April 2014. [PDF]
Xie K., Xia C., Grinberg N., Schwartz R., and Naaman M., Robust detection of hyper-local events from geotagged social media data. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining in KDD, 2013. [PDF]
Schwartz, R., Naaman M., Matni, Z. (2013) Making Sense of Cities Using Social Media: Requirements for Hyper-Local Data Aggregation Tools. In Proceedings, WCMCW at ICWSM 2013, Boston, USA, July 2013. [PDF]
Can We Build a Safer Internet?
Anna North in the New York Times: “We often take it as a given that the Internet is a cruel place, a natural haven for those who seek to harass and threaten others. But to some people, social networks are not mere conduits for our worst impulses. They’re structures whose design can influence how we behave, for good as well as for ill.
Right now, having a social media account can mean facing down a torrent of harassment — including, for some, attacks that are misogynist, racist or both. “Just as you create a space for people to use something in innovative, creative ways, there are also people who will use it for other means,” Moya Bailey, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University who writes about race, gender and media, told Op-Talk. She mentioned Anita Sarkeesian, the video game critic who has faced harassment for critiquing the portrayal of women in games.
“Because she is doing that work, she becomes a target of a lot of violence and hate,” said Ms. Bailey. The rise of online communication is “a gift and a curse always. It’s always both/and.”
And the way we behave online may depend on which site we’re using. Ms. Bailey cites Tumblr as an example. “I think there’s something about Tumblr that is really attractive to social-justice folks, and the kinds of conversations that people have on Tumblr are very different from what’s possible on Facebook,” she explained. “The platforms themselves help shape the kind of content that people post to those different sites.”
The design of those platforms can also determine who sees what we post. Kate Losse, a writer on technology and culture and a former product manager at Facebook, told Op-Talk that Facebook has widened the scope of some of our conversations.
“Pre-Facebook there would be all these different kinds of interactions you might have socially,” she said. “You might talk to one person, you might talk to three people, you might talk to a hundred people. But Facebook’s interesting because you’re always talking to a hundred people when you post, or more.”
“You have to look at something like Facebook as structuring social interactions,” she added. And interacting via what Ms. Losse called “large-scale announcements” can introduce problems. “The Internet is the classic case of tragedy of the commons,” she said. “If something that’s important to me gets viewed by someone across the world, who has no attachment to me, doesn’t care about me at all, doesn’t have any reason to know me or have empathy for me, it’s much easier for that person to do something hateful with the content than to be respectful of it.”
But if platforms can structure our interactions, can they steer us toward kindness rather than toward bile? Batya Friedman, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School who studies the relationship between technology and human priorities, thinks it’s possible. “Any time people talk to each other,” she told Op-Talk, “we have all kinds of social norms that check how we say things to each other. We give each other social cues, we tell each other when somebody’s starting to go too far.”
The question for designers of online communities, she said, is “how do we either create virtual norms that are comparable, or how do we represent those things so that people are getting those cues, so they modulate their behavior?”…”
France Announces An Ambitious New Data Strategy
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch: “After four long months of speculations and political maneuvering, the French Government finally announced that France is getting its first Chief Data Officer….
First, it’s all about pursuing Etalab’s work when it comes to open data. The small team acted as a startup and quickly iterated on its central platform and multiple side projects. It came up with pragmatic solutions to complicated public issues, such as public health data or fiscal policy simulation. France is now the fourth country in the United Nations e-government survey.
Now, the CDO will have even more official and informal legitimacy to ask other ministries to release data sets. It’s not just about following open government theories — it’s not just about releasing public data to serve the public interest. The team can also simulate new policies before they are implemented, and share recommendations with the ministries working on these new policies.
When a new policy is written, the Government should evaluate all the ins and outs of it before implementation. Citizens should expect no less from their government.
At a larger scale, this nomination is very significant for the French Government. For years, its digital strategy was mostly about finding the best way to communicate through the Internet. But when it came to creating new policies, computers couldn’t help them.
Also announced today, the Government is modernizing and unifying its digital platform between all its ministries and services — it’s never too late. The CDO team will work closely with the DISIC to design this platform — it should be a multi-year project.
Finally, the Government will invest $160 million (€125 million) to innovate in the public sector when it makes sense. In other words, the government will work with private companies (and preferably young innovative companies) to improve the infrastructure that powers the public sector.
France is the first European country to get a Chief Data Officer…”
Smart Inclusive Cities: How New Apps, Big Data, and Collaborative Technologies Are Transforming Immigrant Integration
New report by Meghan Benton for the Migration Policy Institute: “The spread of smartphones—cellphones with high-speed Internet access and geolocation technology—is transforming urban life. While many smartphone apps are largely about convenience, policymakers are beginning to explore their potential to address social challenges from disaster response to public health. And cities, in North America and Europe alike, are in the vanguard in exploring creative uses for these apps, including how to improve engagement.
For disadvantaged and diverse populations, accessing city services through a smartphone can help overcome language or literacy barriers and thus increase interactions with city officials. For those with language needs, smartphones allow language training to be accessed anywhere and at any time. More broadly, cities have begun mining the rich datasets that smartphones collect, to help attune services to the needs of their whole population. A new crop of social and civic apps offer new tools to penetrate hard-to-reach populations, including newly arrived and transient groups.
While these digital developments offer promising opportunities for immigrant integration efforts, smartphone apps’ potential to address social problems should not be overstated. In spite of potential shortcomings, since immigrant integration requires a multipronged policy response, any additional tools—especially inexpensive ones—should be examined.
This report explores the kinds of opportunities smartphones and apps are creating for the immigrant integration field. It provides a first look at the opportunities and tradeoffs that smartphones and emerging technologies offer for immigrant integration, and how they might deepen—or weaken—city residents’ sense of belonging…” (Download Report)
Mapping the Next Frontier of Open Data: Corporate Data Sharing
Stefaan Verhulst at the GovLab (cross-posted at the UN Global Pulse Blog): “When it comes to data, we are living in the Cambrian Age. About ninety percent of the data that exists today has been generated within the last two years. We create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data on a daily basis—equivalent to a “new Google every four days.”
All of this means that we are certain to witness a rapid intensification in the process of “datafication”– already well underway. Use of data will grow increasingly critical. Data will confer strategic advantages; it will become essential to addressing many of our most important social, economic and political challenges.
This explains–at least in large part–why the Open Data movement has grown so rapidly in recent years. More and more, it has become evident that questions surrounding data access and use are emerging as one of the transformational opportunities of our time.
Today, it is estimated that over one million datasets have been made open or public. The vast majority of this open data is government data—information collected by agencies and departments in countries as varied as India, Uganda and the United States. But what of the terabyte after terabyte of data that is collected and stored by corporations? This data is also quite valuable, but it has been harder to access.
The topic of private sector data sharing was the focus of a recent conference organized by the Responsible Data Forum, Data and Society Research Institute and Global Pulse (see event summary). Participants at the conference, which was hosted by The Rockefeller Foundation in New York City, included representatives from a variety of sectors who converged to discuss ways to improve access to private data; the data held by private entities and corporations. The purpose for that access was rooted in a broad recognition that private data has the potential to foster much public good. At the same time, a variety of constraints—notably privacy and security, but also proprietary interests and data protectionism on the part of some companies—hold back this potential.
The framing for issues surrounding sharing private data has been broadly referred to under the rubric of “corporate data philanthropy.” The term refers to an emerging trend whereby companies have started sharing anonymized and aggregated data with third-party users who can then look for patterns or otherwise analyze the data in ways that lead to policy insights and other public good. The term was coined at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, in 2011, and has gained wider currency through Global Pulse, a United Nations data project that has popularized the notion of a global “data commons.”
Although still far from prevalent, some examples of corporate data sharing exist….
Help us map the field
A more comprehensive mapping of the field of corporate data sharing would draw on a wide range of case studies and examples to identify opportunities and gaps, and to inspire more corporations to allow access to their data (consider, for instance, the GovLab Open Data 500 mapping for open government data) . From a research point of view, the following questions would be important to ask:
- What types of data sharing have proven most successful, and which ones least?
- Who are the users of corporate shared data, and for what purposes?
- What conditions encourage companies to share, and what are the concerns that prevent sharing?
- What incentives can be created (economic, regulatory, etc.) to encourage corporate data philanthropy?
- What differences (if any) exist between shared government data and shared private sector data?
- What steps need to be taken to minimize potential harms (e.g., to privacy and security) when sharing data?
- What’s the value created from using shared private data?
We (the GovLab; Global Pulse; and Data & Society) welcome your input to add to this list of questions, or to help us answer them by providing case studies and examples of corporate data philanthropy. Please add your examples below, use our Google Form or email them to us at corporatedata@thegovlab.org”
The measurable me: the influence of self-quantification on the online user's decision-making process
Paper by Mimmi Sjöklint for the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: “The advancement of information technology, online accessibility and wearable computing is fostering a new playground for users to engage with quantified data sets. On one hand, the online user is continuously yet passively exposed to different types of quantified data in online interfaces and mobile apps. On the other hand, the user may actively and knowingly be gathering quantified data through ubiquitous sensory devices, such as wearable technology, e.g. the Jawbone UP and Fitbit. In both instances, the user is exposed to versions of self-quantified measures, namely the aggregation and transformation of personally attributed activity into quantified data. This study approaches the adoption of wearables by looking at active and passive self-quantification online and explores how it may influence and support the user’s cognitive processes and subsequent decision-making process.”
Journey tracking app will use cyclist data to make cities safer for bikes
Springwise: “Most cities were never designed to cater for the huge numbers of bikes seen on their roads every day, and as the number of cyclists grows, so do the fatality statistics thanks to limited investment in safe cycle paths. While Berlin already crowdsources bikers’ favorite cycle routes and maps them through the Dynamic Connections platform, a new app called WeCycle lets cyclists track their journeys, pooling their data to create heat maps for city planners.
Created by the UK’s TravelAI transport startup, WeCycle taps into the current consumer trend for quantifying every aspect of life, including journey times. By downloading the free iOS app, London cyclists can seamlessly create stats each time they get on their bike. They app runs in the background and uses the device’s accelerometer to smartly distinguish walking or running from cycling. They can then see how far they’ve traveled, how fast they cycle and every route they’ve taken. Additionally, the app also tracks bus and car travel.
Anyone that downloads the app agrees that their data can be anonymously sent to TravelAI, creating an accurate and real-time information resource. It aims to create tools such as heat maps and behavior monitoring for cities and local authorities to learn more about how citizens are using roads to better inform their transport policies.
WeCycle follows in the footsteps of similar apps such as Germany’s Radwende and the Toronto Cycling App — both released this year — in taking a popular trend and turning into data that could help make cities a safer place to cycle….Website: www.travelai.info“