Archive for the 'technology' Category

Together with my supervisors Sheelagh Carpendale and Carey Williamson at the University of Calgary, i am conducting a Web-based study on information visualization and Web search. Participants of this study are asked to use a visual search prototype for as long as they wish and fill out short questionnaires before and after using the system. The purpose of this research is to better understand performance and usability issues of information visualization supporting search on the Web. The data collected during the study will be anonymised and the questionnaires will not ask for any personal information.

If you are interested in participating, please visit this Web page:

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mdoerk/view

If you have any questions, please contact me at mdoerk[at]ucalgary.ca for more information. In addition, if you have friends or colleagues who you believe might also be interested in participating in this research, we would be grateful if you were to talk to them about this research opportunity and/or forward them this information about our study.

As i read this article on the website of Calgary’s weekly zine FFWD about a local magazine shop and the printed news industry, i thought about print and the physical. I agree with the commenter Melly Mel, that print is awesome and FFWD rules. But i really do appreciate adding comments to articles, subscribing to RSS feeds (which FFWD’s website lacks unfortunately), and saving trees. To me the limitation of the screen boils down to its resolution and versatility (so far) in contrast to paper. I don’t have a problem with taking my laptop and reading blogs or news outside/beyond a desk setting, but paper is in some respects still far superior. Yet, everytime i see those free magazines at C-Train stations and on campus i ask myself is it still worth it? Does printed broadcasting like this still make sense?

I have been to the store mentioned in the article before and i agree it has a nice selection of national and international magazines. But as i read and work more online than on paper, i think i am exposed to a wider range of information and inspiration that i could ever afford to access (read: buy) in such a store. While this may have bad consequences for news/magazine shops, i think there are still opportunities to “make money” off of our information needs. But maybe less directly. Maybe we will rather pay for coffee, muffins, and a nice atmosphere. Coffeeshops and teahouses are already experiencing a new bloom, as we yearn for more social and physical interaction.

Since my last rant about the Calgary Transit website five months ago on this blog and many rants with locals, much has happened. First Calgary Transit updated their website later last year and ironically it deteriorated even more. But the major step happened today: Calgary’s public transport is finally put on Google Transit (press release). Hooray!

There are still some glitches to be fixed. For example, right now the system has troubles integrating the C-Train into trip planning, if not the explicit station names are used for search queries. However, one can click the station explicitly. This problem seems to be due to the naming legacy at Calgary Transit. Where, for example, the university station is called “@Unvrsty STN”, which is a bit unfortunate… Anyhow, thanks to both Google and City of Calgary. Let’s hope now that the physical counterpart of Calgary Transit catches up, too.

Being rather busy these days with course readings and other stuff i tend to neglect this little blog of mine and indirectly you, dear readership. I’m sorry for that. But i have to tell you: the courses are really interesting. I am taking Social Contexts of Technology given by Patrick Feng and Urban Design Theory by David Monteyne. So to let you in on what the readings are about, i’m going to post some of my responses onto this blog. Thematically this fits in with what i was blogging about in the past and otherwise it is always nice to reuse material. So stay tuned.

Today i received again an email from ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) with the subject line “An Invitation to Join ACM”. Before this, i have received numerous of those as postal letters as well as emails. This is probably caused by attending an ACM conference last year. I managed to stop getting the paper versions, but it seems as if my plea for removing my email address from ACM’s database was unheard. I never ticked a checkbox somewhere asking for monthly “invitation” emails and letters. Why is there no easy way of stopping them?

This rather annoying member recruitment practice is only a small thing that makes me feel pity and at the same time slight disgust for the organization that represents so many computer science students and professionals. Academic values like advancing the field for the sake of humanity and sharing knowledge in an open fashion seem to be replaced by careerism and exclusive content — which is ironically only accessible via horrible interfaces such as the ACM digital library. Can you believe people being lured into becoming an ACM member with a flip-flop calculator? It just seems a bit surreal.

It’s not the yearly fee that keeps me from joining. It just doesn’t appeal to me becoming a member of a cheesy elite club, that has little to do with educational, egalitarian, or emancipatory values that i would rather see embraced in computer science and academia in general. ACM is a member-based organization and ultimately — if the members choose so — it can be transformed. I sure hope it does soon.

PS: while i pick here on ACM, the critique probably equally applies to the IEEE Computer Society and the many profit-driven publishers.

It was rather silent here the last weeks, mainly because i have finished my diploma thesis recently and defended (successfully) shortly thereafter. The title of the thesis is Towards a Better VIEW: Visual Information Exploration on the Web. The core idea is the combination of multiple interactive visualization widgets or VisGets that are used to explore web content, for example, from RSS feeds. If you want to know more about it check out the thesis page, where i have put abstract, thesis, and defense slides.

I just stumbled upon these two interactive art installations by Uta Hinrichs and Holly Schmidt: memory [en]code and EMDialog. I think both projects showcase how interactive tabletops and large displays can be engaging and inviting in public settings. I am excited to see more of this. Check out the websites for photos and videos.

I am kind of undecided about Flickr’s recent move to allow small video snippets. Quite a few members are at least not amused. Flickr sells the very short films as long photographs which seems kind of ridiculous at first. The video service Vimeo tries to focus on high-quality, original short movies. There i just went through some of Philip Bloom’s videos and they are amazing! Great perspectives, interesting people, wonderful colors, and good music. In particular, Autumn in Richmond, Piccadilly Furs, South Bank, and Kew Gardens. While only paying pro members can upload video on Flickr, i wonder if this approach towards video – videos are just photos that move up to 90 seconds – will attract such good videos, or better their makers. Right now the video group on Flickr is dominated by mostly snapshot videos.

This saturday the third see conference on visualization of information is happening in Wiesbaden. It features quite a speaker list including Ben Fry, Bruce Sterling, and Frank van Ham. I really wanted to go, so i got my tickets well in advance, but something came in my way and now i hope for good video streaming. By the way, i was promised to get the money back. Very nice.

Ich habe hier vor einiger Zeit einmal das eingebaute Wörterbuch von MacOSX gelobt. Damals habe ich mir gewünscht, dass die Wikipedia und die deutsche Sprache darin gut vertreten sein könnten. Und das sind sie jetzt auch. Wikipediainhalte verschiedenster Sprachen können seit MacOSX 10.5 abgerufen werden. Darüber hinaus gibt es jetzt auch ein Plugin, das einen deutschen Thesaurus und ein deutsch-englisches Wörterbuch bereitstellt. Vielen Dank an Wolfgang Reszel, der diese Wörterbücher für das Lexikon aufbereitet hat und auf einer Tippsseite dessen Funktionsumfang detailliert beschreibt. Nun bedarf es nicht mehr das in die Jahre gekommene Dilo.