To fill, or not to fill in the blanks

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From linkmachinego:

“I know a lot of artists …like the art to be very, very simple, and leave the detail up to the mind of the reader, but what about leaving it in the mind of the writer and artist, and allow us to bring you into our world and let the reader visit what weÂ’ve envisioned, a complete vision – something that is three dimensional and totally realized and will take you completely out of yourself.”

On Monday we have the good fortune to have Jessica Hammer visiting us here to talk about her work: “Six Principles: Toward a Theory of Interactive Narrative”, in which she discusses the counterpoint to the above view – shared authorship:

“The principle of shared authorship addresses the question of who is the author of an interactive story. A single author cannot create enough meaningful content to have a story that is both powerful and interactive, and artificial intelligence is not yet sophisticated enough to have truly computer-generated narratives. To incorporate the human ability to tell a story with the flexibility and interactivity of computer-generated stories, many people must participate in the authorship of the story. A group of users share the duties of authorship, creating a story that makes sense on a human level but is being created in real-time (rather than being authored in advance).”

Looking forward to it. Hopefully I’ll get some notes from her talk up here next week.

» “Six Principles: Toward a Theory of Interactive Narrative”

The switch so far

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Some network/fileserver connection problems, and getting used to a different keyboard layout but pretty much smooth and wonderful experience so far. Somewhat optimistically I’ve borrowed a friend’s copy of “Learning Perl” causing nervous-shudders from colleagues.

Things I just can’t get over:

  • The amount of cool little details, tricks, tips. It’s a rich and complex palace of experience to wander around, compared to the insurance company district-office of windows.
  • The amount of cool little apps, especially opensource that seem to be available and growing in number for MacOSX. Exciting.
  • The fact that I made a playlist in iTunes and it FADES BETWEEN THE TRACKS. Oh, my stars. Caught me completely unawares… 4hero mixed smoothly into Curtis Mayfield. Incredible. And iTunes doesn’t drunk when it mixes so it will be far better than me. The rise of the machines, my friends.

“Our best trained…

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…best educated, best prepared, best equipped troops refuse to fight. In fact it is safe to says they would rather swwwiiiitch… than fight…”*

Yup – I’ve gone over… traded in my ‘orrible grey tower work PC for a shiny OSX TiBook… Omnigraffle and Perlhackin’ here I come… yeah!!!

[*With profuse apologies to the late Dr. King, Chuck D. and the Bomb Squad.]

Are you a dynamist or a statist?

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I’ve sworn off talking about what I do, in place of just doing it; but can’t resist this. Clay, in his continuing metamorphosis toward being the James Randi of the web; has a new piece up debunking some digital-divide myths. In it he points to an interesting idea – Dynamists vs. Statists.

“Virginia Postrel, in her book “The Future and Its Enemies”, (ISBN: 0684862697) suggests that the old distinctions of right and left are now less important than a distinction between statists and dynamists. Statists are people who believe that the world either is or should be a controlled, predictable place. Dynamists, by contrast, see the world as a set of dynamic processes”

This is great! It give us all another axis of definition to argue about! I like it because it reminds me of alignment in D&D… I was always chaotic-good… and now I guess I’m a “Big-Dynamist” IA… Heheh.

» Shirky: Half the World

Stay tuned for more infovisualisation, sportsfans!!!

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“Developed by self-confessed cricket nut Dr Paul Hawkins in collaboration with contract research and development outfit Roke Manor Research, Hawk-Eye uses vision processing technology to track the progress of a cricket ball as it is released from the bowler’s fingers and travels towards the batsman. Three high-speed cameras placed around the ground take around 450 images of the ball in flight. These are processed into a 3D graphical track of the ball, in an action that takes about 1.5 seconds. “Hawk-Eye can track the flight of a ball and position it to within a tolerance of 5mm anywhere on the field,” says Hawkins.

Designed principally as a tool to explain and aid lbw decisions, Hawk-Eye’s graphical representations have become a crucial part of the commentator’s arsenal. “Hawk-Eye can show where the ball was pitched, how the line deviated, whether the bowler put any swing on the ball, how high it bounced and what speed it was travelling at, as well as predicting if it would have hit the wicket in any lbw decision,” says Hawkins.”

» MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | All eyes are on the ball

Infotapestry pt2 / Lazyweb appeal

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Somebody out there on the Lazyweb[tm] do this. Please! Personal mind-marketmaps…

“Random Idea:

  • take the access logs from a weblog
  • work out how many hits each individual entry gets
  • use this to choose a background colour for that entry

Now adapt this process to work in realtime. The more popular stuff (which is likely to be the most interesting) will stick out, less popular stuff will fade into the background, giving attentive visitors an easy way to jump straight to the best content.”

» paranoidfish.org/notes/ : Ambient Page Stats

Mmmm…. visualisation…

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Really, really going to have to write up some stuff about Ben Fry‘s talk; but in the mean time, Peter’s been talking with another info.vis.Guru, Marti Hearst:

“Marti forecasts a significant change in how visualizations are approached. In the past, they’ve been treated as standalone applications, “Look at this thing! And how beautiful it is!” Where as the key for the future will be incorporating it as a small part in a larger system, integrating it with the rest of the interface. In doing so, this will require visualizations to seriously take the problem that users want to solve into account, a motivation currently lacking from many visualizations.

» peterme: marti hearst and info visualisation