S2E7: Shipping's the Verb

Topics: Elijah’s book (D3.js in Action) is now available in print, TaskRabbit and academic outsourcing, web scraping, creative genius, shipping, ORBIS vs. Neatline, and Left Shark.

Show Notes

D3.js in Action: Elijah Meeks: 9781617292118: Amazon.com: Books

• D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data-driven applications using D3.js. You’ll start with in-depth explanations of D3’s out-of-the-box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data–including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3’s rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you’ll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience.

Lincoln Mullen — D3.js in Action

• What this book does better than almost all technical books, however, is explain what makes for good visualizations (in particular, in the humanities). In other words, the book does show you how do to x, y, or z techniques with D3, but even more it shows you what kinds of visualizations are worth doing. That is much harder to teach.

D3 in Action — Jason Heppler

• I’ve been remiss in pointing out that my buddy Elijah Meeks’ D3 in Action has appeared in print. I’ve been getting chapters of the book through Manning’s early digital access for the last few months that he’s worked on the book and can say that it’s an excellent introduction to D3. If you’re looking to get started with the library and, more importantly, how you can use visualization in the humanities effectively, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.

Manning: D3.js in Action

• D3.js in Action introduces you to the most powerful web data visualization library available and shows you how to use it to build interactive graphics and data-driven applications. You’ll start with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of charts, networks, and maps using D3’s out-of-the-box layouts. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content design, animation, and representation of dynamic data–including interactive graphics and live streaming data.

D3.js in Action Forum

• Community feedback on Elijah’s new book.

William Playfair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist, the founder of graphical methods of statistics. William Playfair invented four types of diagrams: in 1786 the line graph and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations.

Pie chart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• A pie chart (or a circle chart) is a circular statistical graphic, which is divided into slices to illustrate numerical proportion. In a pie chart, the arc length of each slice (and consequently its central angle and area), is proportional to the quantity it represents. While it is named for its resemblance to a pie which has been sliced, there are variations on the way it can be presented. The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair’s Statistical Breviary of 1801.

Charles Joseph Minard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Minard was a pioneer of the use of graphics in engineering and statistics. He is most well known for his cartographic depiction of numerical data on a map of Napoleon’s disastrous losses suffered during the Russian campaign of 1812 (in French, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813). The illustration depicts Napoleon’s army departing the Polish-Russian border. A thick band illustrates the size of his army at specific geographic points during their advance and retreat. It displays six types of data in two dimensions: the number of Napoleon’s troops; the distance traveled; temperature; latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates. This type of band graph for illustration of flows was later called a Sankey diagram, although Matthew Sankey used this visualisation 30 years later and only for thematic energy flow).

TaskRabbit connects you to safe and reliable help in your neighborhood.

• TaskRabbit allows you to live smarter by connecting you with safe and reliable help in your neighborhood. Outsource your household errands and skilled tasks to trusted people in your community.

Slack: Be less busy

• We’re on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.

Kickstarter

• We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, 8.3 million people have pledged more than $1.6 billion, funding 81,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.

Kimono : Turn websites into structured APIs from your browser in seconds

• You don’t need to write any code or install any software to extract data with Kimono. The easiest way to use Kimono is to add our bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then go to the website you want to get data from and click the bookmarklet. Select the data you want and Kimono does the rest. We take care of hosting the APIs that you build with Kimono and running them on the schedule you specify. Use the API output in JSON or as CSV files that you can easily paste into a spreadsheet.

Prince: Convert HTML to PDF with CSS

• Prince is an ideal printing component for server-based software, such as web applications that need to print reports or invoices. Using Prince, it is quick and easy to create PDF files that can be printed, archived, or downloaded.

import.io | Web Data Platform & Free Web Scraping Tool

• We are a young startup that’s shaking up the world of data. From our homebase in London, we’re working hard to give people a totally new way to access data from the web. We have an amazing user base and were most recently voted Best Startup by O’Reilly Strata Santa Clara, GigaOM and Web Summit. Backed by top European VCs and Valley-based angel investors, our aim is to make a big impact in the world of data.

The Design of Business

• Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple’s iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.

The End of ‘Genius’ - NYTimes.com

• But the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at “The Daily Show” or – the real heart of creativity – the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon.

Geography of the Post

• The U.S. postal system was the nation’s largest communications network in the nineteenth century. By the close of the century the U.S. Post had extended its reach into nearly every city, town, and hamlet in the country. No other public institution was so ubiquitous and so central to everyday life; dropping off a letter or checking for mail at the local post office was a ritual shared by millions of Americans from Connecticut to Colorado. This visualization maps the spread of the postal network on its western periphery by charting the opening and closing of more than 14,000 post offices west of the hundredth meridian.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

• For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Seth Godin’s ShipIt Journal, now in free PDF format

• Free to print, free to share. Don’t sell or modify. Here’s the thing: If all you do is read this on the screen, IT WON’T WORK. I use all caps with care here. IT WILL NOT WORK. You need to print it and write in it. The audio will help. Good luck. Go ship. Make something happen.

Neatline

• Neatline is a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps, image annotations, and narrative sequences from Omeka collections of archives and artifacts, and to connect your maps and narratives with timelines that are more-than-usually sensitive to ambiguity and nuance. Neatline lets you make hand-crafted, interactive stories as interpretive expressions of a single document or a whole archival or cultural heritage collection. You can import these documents (georeferenced historical maps, manuscripts, high-res photographs, etc.) from an existing collection, or create a new digital archive, yourself. Every Neatline exhibit is your contribution to humanities scholarship, in the visual vernacular.

Catbus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• The Catbus (referred to in the film as, Neko no basu) is a character in the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is a large creature, depicted as a grinning male cat with a hollow body that serves as a bus, complete with windows and seats coated with fur, and a large bushy tail. The character’s popularity has led to its use in a spinoff film, toys for children, an art car, and being featured in the Ghibli Museum, among other products and influences.

emeeks/d3-carto-map — GitHub

• d3.carto is a library for creating layer-based maps using D3. It allows you to easily make tile and vector maps that take advantage of D3’s amazing geospatial functionality.

The only real star of SB49.

• Leftshark subreddit.

Super Bowl XLIX halftime show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• During Perry’s performance of “Teenage Dream” and “California Gurls”, she was accompanied by several dancers in various beach-themed costumes, including two dressed as sharks. In their performance, one of the performers, left of Perry on screen, appeared to miss a cue and danced to his own beat instead of the planned choreography. The shark’s outfits, as well as the performance of this “Left Shark”, quickly became an Internet meme. The organizing choreographer RJ Durell stated that the dancers, both long-time stage performers from Perry’s past concerts, were not given rigorous choreography but instead told to mimic Perry’s moves and “to have loads of fun, and bring to life these characters in a cartoon manner”, and concluded that the Left Shark “nailed it”. Various other elements of Perry’s performance, such as her entrance on a mechanical lion, her costumes, and her exit on a flying star (which itself was compared to the former logo of NBC’s PSA segments The More You Know), were all incorporated into humorous images on social media.

Tetrad of media effects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Generally speaking, a tetrad is any set of four things. In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously.

It’s settled! Creator tells us how to pronounce ‘GIF’ - CNN.com

• “It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.”

Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.