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On the problems of machine-learning and medical data.
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A 'yes' to all of this; English Weird as a thing, and Christmas is the time of English Weird. TDIR begins on December 20th; time to read along.
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Filed away for a thing on data next year.
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I love jq at the command line for even the simplest tasks; I need to go over this at some point.
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This, like everything Tony and Taylor did, is very good. Not just on film, but on creative work, too.
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Excellent overview and collection of links on cryptocurrencies from the Co-op Digital Newsletter; some useful links in here for A Thing.
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"pv – Pipe Viewer – is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion." Looks very handy.
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"xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. Commands should be simple, fast and composable." iiinteresting.
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OK, this is great: Bret Victor's library for exploring interactive documents. Tidy – thanks to its use of data-attributes – but super-clear. Really nice to have a web-based library, too, and one focused on text. Now thinking about this conceit again.
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"There was also one late night when a stranger opened the door and walked into the house when August should have auto-locked the door. (The stranger was trying to enter our next-door neighbor’s house and didn’t realize he was at the wrong door.)" YOU HAD ONE JOB etc.
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Rather looking forward to seeing this play out: thirty days of processing and spelunking CSV, from Paul Downey. Lots of new tools and tricks emerging already.
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Really nice exploration of a small stack for poking data at the commandline. I'm a fan of jq and its ilk already, so this extends some of those techniques.
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"Sheetsee.js is a JavaScript library, or box of goodies, if you will, that makes it easy to use a Google Spreadsheet as the database feeding the tables, charts and maps on a website. Once set up, any changes to the spreadsheet will auto-saved by Google and be live on your site when a visitor refreshes the page." This is good.
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"All it takes to get a website going for a repository on GitHub is a branch named gh-pages containing web files. You also don’t need a master branch, you can have a repo with just one branch named gh-pages. Here is what I think is really cool, if you fork a project with just a gh-pages branch, you’re only a commit away from having a live version yourself. If this repo being forked is using sheetsee.js then everyone is a fork, commit and spreadsheet away from having a live website connected to an easy (a familiar spreadsheet UI and no ‘publish’ flow because Google autosaves) to use database that they manage (control permissions, review revision history)." Very smart.
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Hosted statistics tool with attractive interface and smart API. Not cheap for its single-tier plan ($99/mo), but looks like it might be worth a poke.
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"Here we get a glimpse of an alternative figuration of data itself. Rather than some kind of precious (but immaterial) stuff, or fuel for market speculation, data here is a relationship, a link between one part of the world with another, and a trace that can be endlessly reshaped."
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"DataFart lets you easily graph data from the command line." So it does.
New Work: Spirits Melted Into Air
22 November 2012
I’m excited to be able to share Spirits Melted Into Air with you: a two-week exploration I produced with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as part of their myShakespeare project.
The work is in parts a technology prototype, data visualisation, and artwork. Custom-built, open-source software is used to analyse performance video and generate plots of actors’ positions on stage from a perspective viewpoint. These plots are then used to generate new, secondary artworks: posters, and laser-cut wooden shapes.
The project emerged from an initial workshop and commission by Caper, where we explored various potential ways for technologists to collaborate with the RSC on short projects. From there, I dealt with the RSC direct, meeting key members of their team and understanding a bit more about the various factors influencing performances and productions there.
It was great to be able to take such a fluid, interpretative approach to the work. With hindsight, this was unsurprising: the RSC’s business is interpretation – taking Shakespeare and producing entirely new productions each year, of plays they have often performed countless times. My work was similarly interpretative: initially, building software to explore the data, and then exploring that data as a material – before moving onto the further material exploration of output formats. It’s the sort of structure to work that I’m fond of.
It was also great to have a brief to shape, and ultimately push myself: not just exploring a single technical idea, but seeing it through, end-to-end, to output and display. It was important to me that whatever came out of it – however prototype-y – was both beautiful and accessible. I think the output – especially the lasercuts – has stood up to that internal demand.
Thanks to Rachel and Kat at Caper for setting up the initial commission and the workshops; to Sarah and Ida, for producing the work from the RSC so superbly; and to everyone I met at the RSC who offered insight, ideas, and knowledge.
You can find out more at the Spirits Melted Into Air website.
And, if you’d like to know more about it, or indeed, to work with me on similar work – be it investigative, creative, or artistic – do get in touch.