Kaleidoscope Brain: 100 Visualizations of Moby-Dick
Download this PDF to see 100 beautiful literary visualisations.
Tags: data
352
Thursday, October 7th, 2021
Saturday, October 2nd, 2021
Vonnegut’s Story Shapes | Extraordinary Facility
The next best thing to having Kurt Vonnegut at the blackboard.
Thursday, July 29th, 2021
The Baked Data architectural pattern
Simon describes the pattern he uses for content sites to get all of the resilience of static site generators while keeping dynamic functionality.
Tuesday, June 29th, 2021
Safari 15
If you download Safari Technology Preview you can test drive features that are on their way in Safari 15. One of those features, announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, is coloured browser chrome via support for the meta value of “theme-color.” Chrome on Android has supported this for a while but I believe Safari is the first desktop browser to add support. They’ve also added support for the media attribute on that meta element to handle “prefers-color-scheme.”
This is all very welcome, although it does remind me a bit of when Internet Explorer came out with the ability to make coloured scrollbars. I mean, they’re nice features’n’all, but maybe not the most pressing? Safari is still refusing to acknowledge progressive web apps.
That’s not quite true. In her WWDC video Jen demonstrates how you can add a progressive web app like Resilient Web Design to your home screen. I’m chuffed that my little web book made an appearance, but when you see how you add a site to your home screen in iOS, it’s somewhat depressing.
The steps to add a website to your home screen are:
- Tap the “share” icon. It’s not labelled “share.” It’s a square with an arrow coming out of the top of it.
- A drawer pops up. The option to “add to home screen” is nowhere to be seen. You have to pull the drawer up further to see the hidden options.
- Now you must find “add to home screen” in the list
- Copy
- Add to Reading List
- Add Bookmark
- Add to Favourites
- Find on Page
- Add to Home Screen
- Markup
It reminds of this exchange in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:
“You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.”
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a torch.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of The Leopard.’”
Safari’s current “support” for adding progressive web apps to the home screen feels like the minimum possible …just enough to use it as a legal argument if you happen to be litigated against for having a monopoly on app distribution. “Hey, you can always make a web app!” It’s true in theory. In practice it’s …suboptimal, to put it mildly.
Still, those coloured tab bars are very nice.
It’s a little bit weird that this stylistic information is handled by HTML rather than CSS. It’s similar to the meta viewport value in that sense. I always that the plan was to migrate that to CSS at some point, but here we are a decade later and it’s still very much part of our boilerplate markup.
Some people have remarked that the coloured browser chrome can make the URL bar look like part of the site so people might expect it to operate like a site-specific search.
I also wonder if it might blur “the line of death”; that point in the UI where the browser chrome ends and the website begins. Does the unified colour make it easier to spoof browser UI?
Probably not. You can already kind of spoof browser UI by using the right shade of grey. Although the removal any kind of actual line in Safari does give me pause for thought.
I tend not to think of security implications like this by default. My first thought tends to be more about how I can use the feature. It’s only after a while that I think about how bad actors might abuse the same feature. I should probably try to narrow the gap between those thoughts.
Saturday, June 19th, 2021
My 3 Greatest Revelations - Issue 102: Hidden Truths - Nautilus
Caleb Scharf:
Wait a minute. There is no real difference between the dataome—our externalized world of books and computers and machines and robots and cloud servers—and us. That means the dataome is a genuine alternative living system here on the planet. It’s dependent on us, but we’re dependent on it too. And for me that was nerve-wracking. You get to the point of looking at it and going, Wow, the alien world is here, and it’s right under our nose, and we’re interacting with it constantly.
I like this Long Now view of our dataome:
We are constantly exchanging information that enables us to build a library for survival on this planet. It’s proven an incredibly successful approach to survival. If I can remember what happened 1,000 years ago, that may inform me for success today.
Saturday, May 15th, 2021
Data isn’t oil, so what is it? - How To Measure Ghosts
The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil - as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago - it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.
Monday, April 19th, 2021
My current HTML boilerplate - Manuel Matuzović
This is a great HTML boilerplate, with an explanation of every line.
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021
THE INTERNET — Opte
Visualising the growth of the internet.
Sunday, February 28th, 2021
Nature 150 Interactive
A beautiful interactive visualisation of every paper published in Nature.
Sunday, January 31st, 2021
Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
Sunday, January 17th, 2021
Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
Saturday, January 16th, 2021
Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer
A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.
Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.
Tuesday, January 12th, 2021
Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy
This sounds a lot like Do Not Track …but looking at the spec, the interesting part is the way that this is designed to work in combination with legal frameworks. That’s smart. I don’t think a purely technical solution is workable (as we saw with Do Not Track).
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data | Polypane Browser for Developers
There’s no browser support yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t start adding prefers-reduced-data to our media queries today. I like the idea of switching between web fonts and system fonts.
Monday, November 16th, 2020
CSS Stats
A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:
CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.
Saturday, November 14th, 2020
Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.
Friday, November 13th, 2020
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Sunday, October 18th, 2020
List of Physical Visualizations
A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.
Sunday, September 27th, 2020
‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED
The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.
I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020
Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate
This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.