New Media, New Democracy

Course Closed

Jed — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:38:20 +0000

Hello! If you’re reading this, you’ve stumbled upon the blog for our class. It’s ended (sadly), and while the members of this blog may one day return to continue discussing what we started, we’ve moved on for now. Feel free to look around and leave a comment though – even though we’re studying other things at the moment, we’re still interested!

Thank you for visiting.

Visualizing Wikipedia: NYU

Jed — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:40:37 +0000

Okay, so what I really wanted to do was visualize all of Wikipedia, but seeing as to how less than half of the uncompressed contents filled up the remaining space on my hard drive, I decided to just go ahead and do a visualization of the article on NYU instead.

Visualization of Wikipedia's article on New York University

This word cloud was made with Wordle.

The results were pretty unsurprising; I really wasn’t expecting anything different. But this is an interesting way to look at text based documents; there is something about the process of turning text into an image that makes it much more consumable in the short term.

Many Eyes Visualization Sample: Avg. Annual Income

jeongki — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:02:51 +0000

Visualizing Government 2.0 Camp (2009) Attendees

Nancy Scola — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:25:40 +0000

Created with IBM’s Many Eyes tool, this tree map shows the breakdown of attendees to a recent “rebooting government” camp broken down according to the affiliation of participants. As you can see, there was a close balance between government and vendor attendees. (A live version lives here.)

Time Magazine: How Obama Is Using the Science of Change

Nancy Scola — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:47:39 +0000

Intriguing article about how the campaign made use of the ideas of some behavioral economists.

Economists’ Debate Page

jeongki — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:20:22 +0000

Economists’ Debate page. Interesting readership and participation. http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/293

This reminds me of bloggingheads.tv. http://bloggingheads.tv/

Favorite viral video and meme

Andrew — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:17:42 +0000

Boom Goes the Dynamite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W45DRy7M1no

Yo dawg, I heard you liked… (meme):

http://wimg.co.uk/t64xqJ.jpg

My Favorite piece of Internet meme: Bill O’Reilly Do It Live!

jeongki — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:00:39 +0000

Priceless!

Ars Technica: Young people who embrace mobile tech can feel overconnected

Jed — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:42:39 +0000

“Almost 40 percent of the American adult population has embraced mobile technologies into their lives to keep up on social networking, sharing photos, and working while on-the-go. But not everyone in this group thinks being so connected is a good thing, and it’s not the most likely of demographics, either.”

Check out the full article here.

Ars Technica: Pulling back the curtain on “anonymous” Twitterers

Jed — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:25:47 +0000

“University of Texas researchers have shown that they can “de-anonymize” Twitter accounts based on an anonymous social network topology and a bit of outside Flickr data. They performed a similar trick with anonymized Netflix data back in 2007, and they say the lesson is clear: “anonymity is not sufficient for privacy” on the web.”

Check out the full article here.