Notebook

This post continues from “Of guanxi, kingmakers, and princelings,” describing how we approach projects and let the data inform the presentation. You may want to read that one first.

Working digitally has some similarities to the physical world. For example, when painting, brushes can break down, lighting can change, and models can shift. Often these variable forces have interesting visual results. We've collected a handful of our favorites from the Connected China project. This first image is the result of Katy testing out the homepage on Windows through VMware:

All of our projects start with a data set. As we begin designing a piece, we poke through the data to see how clean it is and what sort of stories it will support, and we investigate what form the final piece could take: is it an app? an exploratory tool? an infographic? At this stage, we'll use various languages or tools (Processing, Python, Excel, and R tend to be the most common) to build custom software that will help us interact with the data and test our ideas about what the data contains.

We are almost one week into the launch of Connected China! One notable discovery has been the early audience indicators: much of the site's traffic has come from within mainland China, and a majority of visitors worldwide are using browsers that have the zh-cn character encoding (suggesting Chinese language computers). This response is surprising given that the site seems to be at least partially blocked in China, with reports of blocked tweets and weibos (Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging site) cropping up even earlier.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Connected China, our collaborative project with Thomson Reuters. Available on the Web as an HTML5 application, and optimized for the iPad, Connected China uses a custom database to explore the cultural and political factors that shape the dynamics of power in modern China.

She has written over 200 books, over 100 of which were New York Times best sellers, has an astounding 280 million books in print, and is credited with bringing romance novels into the modern age — filling their interiors with capable and intelligent women, and filling their covers with a notable lack of, well, you know.

We left our posts at the Fathom offices just as the MBTA suspended service and a statewide driving ban went into effect — but not before setting up a camera and a tripod in the window to keep watch over our fair city as Nor'Easter Nemo arrived.

Being home for Thanksgiving always gives me a huge sense of nostalgia. My family inevitably winds up rehashing the past, including many entertaining stories of my childhood growing up in the '80s. One story that came up again this year was about me being sick with mono in the third grade. I was home from school for over three months, though I don't really remember being all that sick during that time. I actually remember it as one of the best times of my life. I got to stay home from school, lie on our tweed-upholstered barcalounger, and watch soap operas and TV reruns all day. Although I probably missed some critical developmental education, I think it was a worthwhile trade-off for my extensive mental database of useless TV trivia and '80s pop culture knowledge.

At the Remediating the Social conference a couple of weeks ago, Israeli artist Romy Achituv presented a data visualization project of the books in the Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers in South Tel-Aviv. A unique element of this library is the use of emotional judgments from the readers to organize the books. This project resulted from a collaboration between Romy and me, where the main goal was to create a working prototype of a Web-based visualization of the "emotional history" of the books.

During my senior year at Savannah College of Art and Design, I took Language, Culture and Society with Désiré Houngues. Two cultural insights about language stuck with me. In some societies men and women speak with entirely different vocabularies but still communicate verbally with one another. The second was that some languages only have two words for color, white and black (light and dark); if a language includes a third color, it is always red. This led me to research by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist. They made the first hypothesis about how color terms enter a language in a certain order. Later, I came across the World Color Survey, which was established in an effort to continue research into Berlin and Kay's hypothesis. The WCS makes their data available to the public, and I found that this was exactly what I needed to help answer my many questions. The result of the WCS data exploration is below, where about 800,000 individual color chips are grouped by the terms used to describe them.