infopourri: a little bit of everything interesting

Online Northwest 2009 presentation materials

librarianna — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:03:22 +0000

Here’s the “meta handout” and the slides from my Online Northwest talk:

(Both are PDFs, of course).

Posted in Data Visualization, Information Literacy Tagged: onw09 onlinenorthwest

License plates – good for analogy and cool as designed objects

librarianna — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:55:34 +0000

When I teach about Library of Congress call numbers, I like to show a photo of an Oregon license plate – the discussion that results – why do states need to use letters AND numbers? so there are enough combinations so every car gets a unique plate! – really helps to explain why LC is so complicatedly funny looking. It’s not a perfect analogy – license plates are random, LC isn’t – but it works. (I write much more about using analogies in the library instruction classroom here).

Anyway, it’s finally Finals Week so I have some time to tackle the to-do list before my summer break – one of my oldest notes (from, like, January) reminds me to design my own made-up number license plate graphic, just in case my Google-imaged Oregon plate really belongs to a real car. You never know.

Being a typography geek, I don’t want to mess around: I want to use the REAL font for Oregon plates. But who knew the hunt would be so interesting? I found a complete history of Oregon plate design (we’re one of the only states to manufacture plates in-state) and so much more …

Did you know that there is no official US license plate font? Seems weird since there are strict typeface rules for all other road signage. But no: it’s up to states to design their own plates (which makes sense if you’ve ever driven in Virginia).

For a fascinating history of plate design, check this out: http://www.leewardpro.com/articles/licplatefonts/licplate-fonts-intro.html

So much to think about here: embossed lettering v. digital (flat) lettering – does it make a difference in terms of road visibility?

I’ll leave you with an international gallery of license plates, including historical designs: http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/

Happy Finals Week! Drive safe!!

Suggestion maps – Gnod and TuneGlue

librarianna — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:56:20 +0000

Here are some really slick tools to introduce you to new entertainment, based on what you already like:

Gnod designs “self-adapting systems” to suggest music, books, and movies:

And TuneGlue does a similar trick for Music, but also links to album info. It was a little bit creepy how closely this matched my music collection, so I’ll definitely be taking them up on some suggestions.

If you know about other sites like this, please comment! I love this stuff. And does anyone know if there’s a collective name for this technology?

del.icio.us/url

librarianna — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:33:54 +0000

Del.icio.us is without a doubt my favorite place to put my bookmarks, but it’s also a pretty slick search engine, since its entire database consists of sites that other people (real living breathing non-robot people!) have found useful enough to save for later.

But did you know that you can also use del.icio.us to find out how the users of a site describe that site?

Go to del.icio.us/url and enter a URL to see all of the tags and descriptions that real users have assigned to that site. Here’s an example for the silly/funny/weird blog Oddee.

To me, this is so much more meaningful than reading a site’s own “about us” page. And, if you have your own blog or website, it’s a quick & easy way to get usage statistics from users who really do USE your site.

Check it out: del.icio.us/url

WhatTheFont Forum – typography geeks rejoice!

librarianna — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:54:09 +0000

Back in my “document creation specialist” days, when my job was to design digital menus and business cards that exactly matched paper prototypes, I could identify hundreds of fonts by sight. I could have told you the fonts used in any movie’s credits, any billboard, any packaging, anything.

Sadly, font knowledge is one of those “you don’t use it, you lose it” kind of skills, so I’m not nearly as good at it now. But I still love typography, and I’m not yet hopeless – I knew 24 out of the 34 type faces in The Rather Difficult Font Game!

Still, there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to match a font when you don’t know its name. Back in the day, all a designer could do was flip through enormous font books trying to compare serifs and slants and – my old standby – lower case “g”s.

It’s too bad my font skillz atrophied years before the social web revolution … now there’s the WhatTheFont Forum, a community of font geeks that tries to identify the fonts used in uploaded images, like the 7-11 logo. Typography geeks unite!

Check it out: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/forum/

FireShot – screenshot editor for Firefox

librarianna — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:18:24 +0000

Screen shots are a huge part of my workflow, especially for library instruction handouts. Mac OS has always featured an elegant keyboard shortcut + diagonal drag method for grabbing screen shots, while the Windows routine has been the print screen button + paste + cropping every single shot.

Clearly cropping is a big time waster. I was a fan of Snapper, a Firefox extension that used a Mac-like diagonal drag. Sadly, Snapper hasn’t been updated to work with the new versions of Firefox. Happily, I just found FireShot !

FireShot has the added coolness of a text editor and drawing tools, so you can embed captions & pointers in your graphic. It even makes the camera clicky noise I like so much on my Mac. Yay!

Check it out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648

Free: Yes
Sign up: No

artViper’s Text Tag Cloud Generator

librarianna — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:47:03 +0000

Here’s a super easy way to generate your own tag clouds from any block of text.

Check it out: http://www.artviper.net/texttagcloud/

Free: Yes

Gapminder World – visualize changing trends worldwide

librarianna — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:20:36 +0000

I first heard about Gapminder and its Trendalyzer software from the TED talks by Hans Rosling. Gapminder offers a striking representation of worldwide (or national) trends in population, health, economy, and other indicators.

Check it out: http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/applications/

Free: Yes

VisualLiteracy.org – “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods”

librarianna — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:10:09 +0000

The folks at VisualLiteracy.org have designed a great primer for anyone who wonders what the heck data visualization is and why anyone gets excited about it.

Check it out: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Amaztype – words made from book covers

librarianna — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:04:00 +0000

This is a fun one. Type any word and watch as amaztype renders your word from relevant book covers pulled from Amazon. It’s the relevance that makes this truly cool – try “dog” for a good example.

Check it out: http://amaztype.tha.jp/

Free: Yes
Sign up: No