Featuring “38 projects and more than 730,000 records,” the Los Angeles Times now has a Data Desk feature, a collection of searchable data sets and information graphics from recent publications. It’s like reading the LA Times online but only paying attention to the data-oriented features. (Boring? Appealing? Your ideal newspaper? We database, you decide. Eww, don’t repeat that.) On first glance I thought (hoped) it would be more raw data, but even having all the items collected in one location suggests something interesting for how newspapers share (and perceive, internally) their carefully researched (an massaged) data that they collect on a regular basis.

Thanks to Casey for the pointer.

James Torget, by way of my inbox:

I wanted to touch base to let you know about a workshop that we’re putting together out here at the University of Richmond.  Basically, UR (with James Madison University) will be hosting a workshop this spring focused on how scholars can create visualizations of historical data and how we can better share our data across the Internet.  To that end, we are looking for people working on these questions who would be interested in participating in an NEH-sponsored workshop.

We are seeking proposals for presentations at the workshop, and participants for our in-depth discussions.  The workshop is scheduled for February 20-21, 2009 at the University of Richmond.  We are asking that people submit their proposals by December 15, and we will extend invitations for participation by December 31, 2008. Detailed information can be found at: http://dsl.richmond.edu/workshop/

We’ve just posted Processing 1.0 at http://processing.org/download. We’re so excited about it, we even took time to write a press release:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and LOS ANGELES, Calif. - November 24, 2008 - The Processing project today announced the immediate availability of the Processing 1.0 product family, the highly anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency - and packed with hundreds of innovative, time-saving features - the new Processing 1.0 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

Whups! That’s not the right one. Here we go:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

• At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.
• At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.
• At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

• Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.
• Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.
• Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.
• The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.
• The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.
• The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

Received a note from Vitor Silva, who created the Portuguese-language examples from Visualizing Data using Processing.js:

i created a more “world friendly” version of the initial post. it’s now in english (hopefully in a better translation than babelfish) and it includes a variation on your examples of chapter 3.

The new page can be found here. And will you be shocked to hear that indeed it is far better than Babelfish?

Many thanks to Vitor for the examples and the update.

Hilarious, bizarre, and rambling segment from last night’s Daily Show featuring John Oliver’s take on CNN’s favorite toy from this year’s election.

I’m continually amazed by the amount of interest this technology generates (yeah, I posted about it too), so perspective from the Daily Show is always helpful and welcome.

Casey yesterday noted this article from the New York Times on the declining number of women who are pursuing computer science degrees. Declining as in “wow, weren’t the numbers too low already?” From the article’s introduction:

ELLEN SPERTUS, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.

Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.

The article goes on to explain that even though there is far better gender parity (since 1991) when looking at roles in technical fields, computer science still stands alone in moving backwards.

The text also covers some of the “do it with gaming!” nonsense. As someone who became interested in programming because I didn’t like games, I’ve never understood why gaming was pushed as a cure-all for disinterest in programming:

Such students who choose not to pursue their interest may have been introduced to computer science too late. The younger, the better, Ms. Margolis says. Games would offer considerable promise, except that they have been tried and have failed to have an effect on steeply declining female enrollment.

But I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment with regard to age. I know of two all-girls schools (Miss Porter’s in Connecticut and Nightingale-Bamford in New York) who have used Processing in courses with high school and middle school students, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Let’s hope there are more.

Very cool! Check out these implementations of several Visualizing Data examples that make use of John Resig’s Processing.js, an adaptation of the Processing API with pure JavaScript. This means running in a web browser with no additional plug-ins (no Java Virtual Machine kicking in while you take a sip of coffee—much less drain the whole cup, depending the speed of your computer). Since the first couple chapters cover straightforward, static exercises, I’d been wanting to try this, but it’s more fun when someone beats you to it. (Nothing is better than feeling like a slacker, after all.)

View the introductory Processing sketch from Page 22,  or the map of the United States populated with random data points from Page 35.

Babelfish translation of the page here, with choice quotes like “also the shipment of external filing-cabinets had that to be different of what was in the book.”

And the thing is, when I finished the proof of the book for O’Reilly, I had this uneasy feeling that I was shipping the wrong filing-cabinets. Particularly the external ones.

Via this Slate article from Farhad Manjoo (writer of tech-hype articles with Salon and now Slate), I just read about Droid, the typeface used in Google’s new Android phones. More specifically, he references this Forbes article, describing the background of the font, and its creator, Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation in Elk Grove, Illinois.

Some background from the Forbes piece:

In fonts, Google has a predilection for cute letters and bright primary colors, as showcased in the company’s own logo. But for Android Google wanted a font with “common appeal,” Davis says. Ascender’s chief type designer, Steve Matteson, who created the Droid fonts, says Google requested a design that was friendly and approachable. “They wanted to see a range of styles, from the typical, bubbly Google image to something very techno-looking,” Matteson says.

The sweet spot—and the final look for Droid—fell somewhere in the middle. Matteson’s first design was “bouncy”: a look in line with the Google logo’s angled lowercase “e.” Google passed on the design because it was “a little too mannered,” Matteson says. “There was a fine line between wanting the font to have character but not cause too much commotion.”

Another proposal erred on the side of “techno” with squared-off edges reminiscent of early computer typefaces. That too was rejected, along with several others, in favor of a more neutral design that Matteson describes as “upright with open forms, but not so neutral as a design like, say, Helvetica.”

I haven’t had a chance to play with an Android phone (as much as I’ve been happy with T-Mobile, particularly their customer service, do I re-up with them for two years just to throw money at alpha hardware?) so I can’t say much about the face, but I find the font angle fascinating, particular in light of Apple’s Helvetica-crazy iPhone and iPod Touch. (Nothing says late 1950s Switzerland quite like a touch-screen interface mobile phone, after all.)

Ascender Corporation also seems to be connected to the hideously named C@#$(*$ fonts found in Windows Vista and Office 2007: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, Cariadings. In the past several years, Microsoft has shown a notable and impressive commitment to typography (most notably, hiring Matthew Carter to create Verdana, and other decisions of that era), but the new C* fonts have that same air of creepiness of a family who names all their kids with names that start with the same letter. I mean sure, they’re terrific people, but man, isn’t that just a little…unnecessary?

The New York Times has a very nicely done election map this year. Amongst its four viewing options is a depiction of counties that voted more Democratic (blue) or Republican (red) in comparison to the 2004 presidential election:

The blue is to be expected, given that the size of the win for Obama, but the red pattern is quite striking.

Also note the shift for candidate home states, in Arizona with McCain on the ticket, and what appears to be the reverse result in parts of Massachusetts, with Kerry no longer on the ticket. (The shift to the Democrats in Indiana is also amazing: without looking at the map closely enough I had assumed that area to be Obama’s home of Illinois.)

I recommend checking out the actual application on the Times site, the interaction lacks some of the annoying ticks that can be found in some of their other work (irritating rollovers that get in the way, worthless zooming, and silly transition animations). It’s useful and succinct, just like an infographic should be. Or just the way Mom used to make. Or whatever.