mahir / casualdata

My personal notes, inspirations, experiences and so. Mostly posting about design, maps, visualization and cities.

[mapsontheweb]

Map of where pedestrians are hit or killed in San Francisco

[mahir]

Why Medium?

I love tumblr but I am moving to Medium. I am not sure when I will post on tumblr again. I tried to explain why Medium is the new medium in my first post there. 

[mahir]

Katie Lewis is one of my favorite artists. I always go back and look at her work over and over. I am not sure what's so mesmerizing in her work but it makes me to think about the connections among aesthetics, nature, numbers and complexity.

Above: Accumulated Numbness. pins, enamel, pencil; 69″ x 300″ x 1.5″

[mahir]

I love the typography of these old-school sentence tags from Turkish books. I wish someone would trace them and create a digital typeface with all those beautiful turkish characters (Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü). 

[mahir]

The Roman convention of closing every article of correspondence by writing "given" and the day and month —meaning perhaps "given to messenger"— led to data becoming a term for "the time (and place) stated."

Date #1 (Online Etymology Dictionary)

[mapsontheweb]

[mahir]

Detroit Traffic Survey 1936-1937: Mass Transportation Passenger Flow During General Traffic Peak Hours, 5pm to 6pm (via mapsontheweb)

[mahir]

q-tilings (2013) by Pablo Valbuena. Currently on view at Duda original in Lisbon.

[mahir]

Original "Locals vs. Tourists" by Eric Fischer built with the power of MapBox and Twitter data from Gnip. It's fully-browsable worldwide map of local allegiances. I like how Istanbul looks on the map. Since most of the people were tweeting from the boats you can't see the borders of the Bosphorus clearly. The data cloud between Asia and Europe is flowing rather than having solid borders. I hope we can see the time-lapse of the visuals in the upcoming versions. You can browse more cities on MapBox project page.

[mahir]

Amazing photo-series on Hong Kong by Michael Wolf that display the density and patterns of buildings. It almost feels like the images are computer generated, then a moment later you realize that people live or work in those buildings. Makes me think about the future of the cities.

[mahir]

The quest on the mystery of Pi number never stops. Visual Techniques advancing, so we can visualize more numbers in the Pi decimals. However, Is there really a pattern in those numbers? Are we going to see a great (holy?) picture at the end? I am not sure about what we are going to figure out but some of these images look like they are purely designed. Even though they are just the visualization of digits. Maybe Pi number has a secret of a design pattern in itself, a great formula? Read and see more on http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/art/

[mahir]

The first comprehensive paper that includes media visualizations, results, and detailed analysis is tilted: Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through social media. It was published in the July 2013 issue of the journal ”First Monday” devoted to internet research.

The paper presents analysis of 2.3 million Instagram photos shared by people in 13 global cities.

http://phototrails.net/

[mahir]

Now-Here-This has a great gallery of Alternative Tube Maps. One piece in the gallery is a radio-map! Yuri Suzuki's fully functional radio on a printed circuit board that looks just like the tube map is truly inspiring. Since geodata and maps are becoming more and more open to public, we start to see their influence on arts better. 

Sound Artist/Designer Yuri has a nice portfolio site with many other projects.

[mahir]

"Visualizing Vertov" - a new experimental project by Lev Manovich with 33 visualizations is focusing on two famous movies, The Eleventh Year (1928) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Vertov.

Image Above: All shots with close-ups of faces from The Eleventh Year (Dziga Vertov, 1928). The shots are arranged in the order of their apperance in the film, left to right, top to bottom. See the details of the analysis on Software Studies.

I am always amazed with the idea of analyzing all the data of a movie (shots, characters, images, editing, script, locations, etc.) With the advance of CPU technology and open coding culture, we started to see powerful analysis on movies, data visualizations focusing on large data sets of moving imagery. Soon enough we may see the analysis and visualization of all the oscar winning movies, all movies from hollywood, and so. 

If you are interested in visualization about movies, tv shows you should check these two projects as well: Pie, comparison of films trough colour by Alan Woo and Lostalgic, visualiziton of some properties and patterns out of the entire lost script by Santiago Ortiz.

[mahir]

I love the simplicity, color use and typography of this Newsweek graph. It may be one of the best "infographics" of the year. 

[seebytouch]

[mahir]

One of the most inspiring visual narrative blog I have seen lately: what love looks like?

“Happiness comes from the obstacles.”—Reuben

“Heisenberg showed that the more precisely one determines the position of an atomic particle, the less one can know about its speed. These shy qualities reverse their roles: the more exactly a particle’s velocity is measured, the more elusive its location becomes.

“‘Science does not describe and explain nature,’ Heisenberg concluded, but ‘nature as exposed to our method of questioning.’”—A General Theory of Love

[mahir]

Henry Chinaski's Women and What They Meant to Him, 2006

Thirty one women appear in this novel, only a few of which Bukowski’s main character did not sleep with. The timeline documents the duration of each woman’s appearance by page numbers, as well as Henry Chinaski’s opinion of them based on the words “fuck” and “love” as mentioned in the book. More good stuff on louisema.com

[mahir]

A different look on election results. Patchwork Map of the U.S. explains how and why Obama won based on categorized locations. I find this map very useful to understand how  diversified different states are in the U.S. As a politician you can even develop your own strategies based on this map. It's clear that one obvious reason to win was Obama has all industrial metropolises. Read more about it on WNYC.