I've been programming interactive maps visualisations using Flash and Actionscript 3 for almost a year now. Actionscript 3 code is what's behind the scenes of most the Flash work I've been involved with at Stamen so far: Trulia Hindsight, Digg Arc, Twitter Blocks, Modest Maps and more.
So in the spirit of writing about what's important to me (and what I'm actually doing) instead of only writing tangential asides, I'm going to start writing occasional notes on Actionscript 3 here. Hopefully the ideas explored will contribute to my upcoming workshop at Etech in San Diego in March.
I considered starting a new blog, but I've had to deal with my fractured blogging personae twicebefore already. Hopefully there'll be enough visualisation and project links to keep non-coders interested.
All kinds of people read this blog for all kinds of reasons, you might not care who I spent New Year with and that's OK with me. The actionscript posts will be tagged with as3, if that's all you're interested in you can subscribe to a feed of them here. (The same is true of the Processing posts, which have a feed here).
I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions at the moment. Our protagonist, Kilgore Trout, is hitch-hiking in a truck which has PYRAMID written on it in massive letters. He wonders about the implications:
"Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the message was terrifically important, since somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big."
I often wonder the same thing about blogging, twittering, linking on del.icio.us, open source programming, and so on. The things we do in public, on the web, aren't always that significant. And yet to a passing reader they must appear to be very important to us. It seems that often we don't get around to writing the important stuff down, precisely because it matters so much.
My new year's resolution is to take time to write the important stuff down, in MASSIVE LETTERS.
Like Mike, I spent New Year in a holiday cottage in Sonoma, enjoying the company of friends good and new. Aaron was a permanent fixture in the kitchen, tending to his cassoulet for three days in a quest for the mythical crust.
Being vegetarian, I didn't sample the dish itself (though that didn't stop some people!). I did manage to document the eating using the timelapse feature on my camera. It's not quite up to Cassidy's standards, but it's a nice memento of the evening and it was interesting to have an instant replay of dinner as soon as we were done!
In my post about the good people at Yahoo's design research group in September I suggested that some of their visualisations remind me of the movie War Games. I love the movie, but I continue to think that certain kinds of accidental visual resonance should be avoided. The 'incoming' visualisations by the good people at Dopplr have this problem too.
Today, Mike sent me the above image that Gem ffffound showing the devastation caused by the Oakland Hills firestorm in 1991. It's shocking, stunning and scary all at once to see so many homes ablaze like that. Mike pointed out that it looks like some of the work from our Trulia Hindsight project at Stamen.
Thankfully I think Mike was referring to the early prototypes I made in Processing using additive blending and a red-through-blue colour range. I've uploaded a movie of one of these prototypes to Vimeo so you can get an idea of what we're talking about:
The fact that certain parts of the movie looked like San Francisco was burning, or being bombed, was definitely a problem we had to avoid for the final piece. It's something I wouldn't want to be thinking about addicentally if I was trying to find out about real-estate in the area. What we want is to make something that can illustrate the effects of real devastation if we want it to, without emotionally swindling you if you just want to think about urban growth. That's why we knocked out the red and orange hues in the colour range, added a drop shadow and ditched the additive blending. Ultimately, it was more appropriate to show data on the map than in the map.
So, if you want to you can look up some of the areas of Oakland affected by the fires in 1991, such as this example, and spot the clear rebuilding activity in 1992. With luck, the animation will illustrate some of the devastation caused by the fires, without looking like a simulated disaster.
Over at Data Mining, Matthew Hurst takes exception to JC Herz's assessment of his map of the blogosphere as "(approx.) "completely useless"". Having recently engaged in several discussions about beautiful-but-useless visualizations I continue to insist that not everything has to be useful; perhaps Matthew doesn't intend for his map of the blogosphere to necessarily be useful in a traditional sense. That said, I have to admit that JC's blunt assessment is easy to agree with, and I had a similar reaction to the maps when I first saw them myself.
After the initial wave of early Google Maps mashups, some members of the mapping hacks community settled on the term "Red Dot Fever" (coined by Jo Walsh or Schuyler Erle, I think) to sum up the common patterns they were seeing. In a similar fashion (affectionate, but with a critical eye), my colleague Mike Migurski calls the prevailing network visualization technique the "Sticks and Rocks Diagram".
Matthew's images clearly have lots in common with the kinds of work catalogued meticulously at Visual Complexity. Sadly, I think a lot of the work there (some of my own included) is better at illustrating the problem than really informing us about the data that drives it. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a popular approach to something, but when the results are so often misunderstood I bet we can all do better.
I've read a lot of research papers that would suggest that visualizing large complex networks is hard. Throwing the data at the screen and seeing what sticks is possibly a road to understanding, but I suspect it's an incredibly long one. Calling something "completely useless" doesn't drive our field forward or help open it up to new audiences, but the sentiment underpinning that reaction is something we could all work to understand better.
To me, red-dot-fever maps and sticks-and-rocks diagrams always look like works in progress.
Sorry for the recent outage on Processing Blogs. For some reason all the wordpress plugins deactivated themselves. I hate the internet, and the internet hates me.
Barclays have launched a combined credit, Oyster and cash payment card for travellers in London (a textbook Greenfield device if ever I saw one). At the moment there are ads for it all over the tube featuring a variety of mocked-up Minority Report-style futurescapes based on present day London. Thanks to Flickr I found that Ned Richards grabbed a couple of snaps of them; he's definitely right that the golf courses aren't as exciting as roller-coasters.
I love this kind of imagery, but my last year of travel has pretty much convinced me that you don't need to mock them up. I haven't been any of the cities that get the most attention for their present day sci-fi realities (Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore), but there are pockets of unevenly distributed future all over the place. Here's a picture I took last week from London's Docklands Light Railway:
And one of the same part of London from the 23rd floor of One Churchill Place:
(apparently it was one of the first skyscrapers to be completed after 9/11 and therefore one with a tough attitude towards security and structure stability, which is good because just over to the right of this photo is London City Airport's runway)
I started thinking about the future-now of Western cities in May when XTech in Paris placed us in a hotel overlooking a tried-and-failed Modernist complex near the Eiffel tower. References to Alphaville were inevitable, the French origins of Parkour were entirely explained.
I'm not the only one taking these snaps though, my friend Adam took this one in Chicago recently. As if the city-scape there isn't sci-fi enough, his phone camera was kind enough to accidentally filtr it into concept territory, just so:
Let's try this again. If you're reading this on Processing Blogs or via its feed, then everything should be working.
Instead of Feedwordpress and Planet Planet put together with sticky tape and glue, I'm using the better documented Planet Venus and WP-Venus so our archives are maintained.
If you ever need to run a site similar to Processing Blogs and your web host can run python then I definitely recommend Planet or Planet Venus as the solution. WP-Venus complained a little bit when I converted from Feedwordpress, but it looks good so far: hopefully the archives will be worth the effort.
. It's not quite up to 
