Week 9: Soarin’ Over California

soarin

“A Personal Walk Through Historical Simulation Modeling at UCLA” by Diane Favro described UCLA’s efforts to create a digital technologies to study Roman architecture and culture. “For the Romans, walking, thinking, and memory were inextricably intertwined”, and Favro and some colleagues wanted to reflect this through reproducing historical Roman architecture. The UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (CVRLab) and the Experimental Technologies Center (ETC) have worked together since the 90s to try to accomplish this. In the beginning, they held showings at the UCLA Visualization Portal, which was a theater with surround sound and a large semi-spherical screen that “gives the audience a sense of immersion in the projected models”. Since then, the teams have made an interactive website in 2003, and their 3D models have been featured in Google Earth Ancient Rome 3D in 2008.

Over Thanksgiving break my parents and 11 year-old sister visited me in LA. My sister wanted to go to Disneyland, and since my parents were sick of even the idea, they dropped me off with her. I was reminded of theme park simulators after reading about the UCLA Visualization Portal being used for 3D Roman models of ancient building. Soarin’ Over California, a ride I did just last week, uses 3D simulation so that riders feel like they’re actually soaring over the Golden Gate Bridge or Half Dome.

The CVRLab team had many issues, as Favro mentioned in her article, with the UCLA Visualization Portal. Viewers familiar with the historical spaces or those with gaming experience would become disoriented in the environments. This prompted the CVRLab team to add a map that shows the position and orientation while in the middle of the simulation. But then the map took away the feeling of actually being in the environment.

Although the CVRLab eventually produced successful contributions to 3D modeling and the UCLA Visualization Portal was a decade before well-developed simulators came out, Soarin’ Over California was an immediate success in 2001. Guests are lifted in seats in a forward position so that the look into the large, concave movie screen. Subtle movements of the seats are synchronized with the film to mimic the feeling of flight. Scents are projected in various scenes, and wind is blown in riders’ faces.

It’s interesting to see the differences in how 3D modeling simulation and simulation in general is used for different purposes. It’ll be especially interesting where the future of simulation is headed (The Matrix, anyone?).

Week 8: Mobile Apps with Good and Bad User Interfaces

These weeks readings on interaction design and interfaces makes for my favorite week so far. As a designer, I knew exactly what each author was referring to through my previous knowledge of mocking up websites. However, the collection of readings for this week went farther than just me being able to relate personally because they were written through a digital humanities point of view. In “‘So the Colors Cover the Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability”, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum quotes Donald A. Norman, who says “The real problem with interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on interface. I want to focus on the job”.

I always assumed that interfaces were a tool for users to navigate through complicated information to get what they want, not something that disables them. But Norman is correct – interface is often a highly recursive phenomenon. The secret of interface design is to “make it go away”, not to further complicate matters. Shneiderman’s “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design” outlines how to create a successful interface design, and although the article does not mention this, one of the main goals of the eight rules is to “make it go away”.

Old-facebook

Remember when Facebook’s mobile app used to look like this? Although it’s not the ugliest interface I found online, it is a perfect example of bad UI/UX. As a frequent Facebook user, I found myself only using a few of the options in the old homescreen – the news feed, my profile, and messages. Rarely would you use the rest of the options, and one of these reasons was because they were accessible through the options I did use. Instead of being able to easily switch from your news feed straight to your profile, you had to return to Facebook’s home menu. An extra click, an extra few seconds of time wasted.

instagram-fix

Facebook has since redeveloped their mobile app into a more fluid, user-friendly version, but I’m not going to use it as my example of good user interface. Instagram is my favorite mobile app, and its simplicity might be why it wins over every other mobile app. You have five options – and they’re listed permanently on the bottom of your screen so you can move from option to option. Your newsfeed is what you land on immediately when opening the app. Next in your toolbar is a search option, the button to take and edit your picture, your notifications and friend requests, and then your profile. That is its structure, which embodies its scope and strategy in the simples of ways by being so bare-bones (Elements of User Experience by Jesse James).

More often than not we use bad interface design. We get frustrated at the website we’re on, the navigation device in our car, or whatever it is but don’t know what we’re getting frustrated at. The point of design is make these problems less of a problem, which is why interface and user interaction design is so very important, especially for what the future has in store for us.

 

Week 7: NYTimes Interactive Maps

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/03/upshot/ncaa-football-map.html?_r=0#10,34.155,-118.116

http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map

I found the Introduction to Web Mapping to be a great summary of the development of maps on the web. It was especially interesting since I took a course on GIS last year, and I plan on going into web design – and both relate to web mapping. Web mapping has had a huge impact on personal navigation; Google Maps has enabled anyone with a smartphone and signal to find anything. People no longer need to struggle over a large printed map, instead, Google Maps links people to their destination for them. But web maps have broadened more horizons than just navigation. Maps have always been incredible visual sources of information, and I especially enjoy New York Times’ interactive maps.

The lesson went over the definition of interactive maps, and states that most commonly interactive maps include the ability to zoom and pan. Other forms of interactivity include the ability to toggle map layers on and off, obtain detailed information about map features, and browse to web sites associated with map features. While the first maps on the web may have been overwhelmingly static, interactive maps are now commonplace.

One NYtimes map that was particularly horrifying to me was the College Football Fan Map. The New York Times mapped out the percentages of who was loyal to which college football team in each county across the nation. The map is interactive, so I immediately zoom in to my hometown. It is bright red, which was expected because I live close to Stanford. Next, I went south towards Los Angeles. Where was UCLA’s fan base? A tiny section of the Westside showed our tiny fan base in comparison to USC’s, which dominated most of Southern California.

Without visualizations like this map, it is a lot more difficult to interpret statistics and draw a conclusion from them. I immediately saw how small the area UCLA’s fans are located with New York Times interactive map.

Another NYTimes map that’s intriguing is the map of homicides in New York City. You can toggle different filters to see what ethnicity was the victim, the gender of the perpetrator, the month and time of day, and others. This map is an example of a tool that would be useful to the police force in order to prevent future murders, an outcome of a map that’s a little more useful than seeing how big you school’s fan base is.

 

Week 6: Airplane Networks

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http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/

Demystifying Networks by Scott Weingart describes the beginnings of networks and how they can be used today within the digital humanities setting. Before the reader gets too excited on networks, Weingart gives a few warnings when dealing with networks – 1) yes networks can be used on an project, but that does not mean they should be. Networks only work for certain projects, and we must not get carried away when using them otherwise they will appear and become misused. 2) “methodology appropriation is dangerous” in that the methods and procedures one used on one network are not the same when working with a different set of data. Borrowing these methodologies can be even more dangerous because the users lack the knowledge to apply them correctly.

Weingart also covers “stuff”. Within his topic of stuff there are nodes, the connectors and organizers between the stuff. Nodes have attributes, or contain data on the stuff. Demystifying Networks uses books as the example of stuff. Different examples of books (dictionary, Poe collection, Harry Potter, etc) are the nodes. The title, number of pages, and author are node attributes. The next overarching topic is “relationships”. Weingart nicknames them “edges”, and defines them by the nodes that they connect. Continuing the book example, he takes person Franco Moretti and lists the edges that contain Franco Moretti – that he is an author of Modern Epic and Graphs, Maps, and Trees.

I took a network created by a UCLA alumni and applied what I learned from Demystifing Networks. Aaron Koblin is a Design Media Arts graduate (especially cool since I’m also in DMA) who represented visually and interactively the network of flight patterns across the United States. The project is part of a series called Celestial Mechanics, “a plalanetarium-based artwork installation that visualizes the statistics, data, and protocols of manmade aerial technologies. However, these specific renderings show the altitudes, makes, and models of over 205,000 different aircrafts being monitored by the FAA on August 12, 2008. You can filter which aircraft you wish to see, zoom in on specific areas of the map, and even download high quality images for your desktop backgrounds because the resulting maps are so gorgeous.

With this example, defining the stuff, nodes, and relationships are more difficult because there is no database available to the public. I can say that the stuff is each individual airplane with its unique destination; the nodes are the airports (connecting the planes together); the attributes of the stuff is the aircraft, its altitude, the number of passengers, the flight number, etc; the attributes of the nodes is the size of the airport, the address, how many terminals it has, and if it’s an international airport or purely domestic; and finally, the relationship between the planes and airports could be which airline owns the plane and if its available at the airport. Visually, I don’t think there’s a more stimulating network graphic than this one. But with the promising future of networks, undoubtedly someone will take inspiration from Koblin’s work and stretch the boundaries of beautiful network visualizations.

Week 5: Infographics and Bill Gates

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http://designtaxi.com/news/370393/Infographic-The-Life-Of-Bill-Gates-How-He-Started/?interstital_shown=1

http://www.gatesnotes.com/globalpages/bio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

 

Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display by Johanna Drucker is a brief about how digital humanists have started to incorporate visualization tools and methods to display information on their work about the social sciences. The paper’s thesis is that “we need a humanities approach to the graphical expression of interpretation” in order to have an accurate representation of data. “Assumptions of knowledge as observer-independent and certain, rather than observer co-dependent and interpretative” are made while visualizing information, and without the process described data will not be understood as “capta” and the wrong message will be interpreted. “Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed.” Drucker argues that data visualization needs to be reworked to the digital humanists’ process so for the smooth transferring of knowledge.

Infographics are a recent internet fad and a form of visualizing data. Performing exactly what Drucker discusses in her article, most of the time they refer to tall, skinny (to fit Pinterest dimensions) images with eye-catching colors and multiple graphs to stop an internet user in his or her tracks. A lot of backlash from digital humanists is that they are intended to look pretty instead of providing accurate information.

Recently I stumbled upon an infographic that tracks Bill Gates’ life story. A lot of the time when I stop and look at infographics, I immediately assume that their figures are correct and that its sources are reliable. Because of Drucker’s article, I’m going to use this blog post to quickly double check whether the Bill Gates infographic is accurate or not.

Anna Vital cited two sources for her infographic: Walter Isaacson’s book The Innovators and gatesnotes.com. Gatesnotes.com has a timeline of Bill Gates’ life, which aligns with Vital’s infographic. However, Vital’s infographic also includes the not-so-amazing parts of Gates’ history, such as designing a program to schedule students into classes which he used to schedule himself into classes with more girls. How do we know if that information is correct?

A quick Wikipedia search reveals that Bill Gates quoted that story in a press room speech, which was retrieved on July 13, 2013. Since more than 50% of the information is accurate, I’m going to assume the entire infographic to be accurate. Obviously you’d want to check the entire infographic, but most people (including myself) are not willing to go through every detail to make sure what they’re reading is correct. This goes back to Drucker’s point that by approaching graphic visualization from a digital humanities viewpoint is important to make sure the data we portray is accurate for users.

Week 4: Urban Dictionary, Yelp, and Redundancies Amongst Databases

Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 1.17.16 PM

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Derpes

http://www.yelp.com/biz/sushi-gen-los-angeles

http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=dinner+date&find_loc=Santa+Monica%2C+Los+Angeles%2C+CA&ns=1&ls=18a1fe2a08cbb764#attrs=RestaurantsPriceRange2.2&l=p:CA:Los_Angeles::Santa_Monica

Stephen Ramsay’s “Databases” in A Companion to Digital Humanities is a technical description of what databases are and the progression of the design models there have been. Database systems allow “for the efficient storage and retrieval of information”. Without databases, we would have an enormous amount of unsorted data with so much potential, but with no easy way to access particular datasets.

One early problem with databases was that they carried “inefficiencies that often resulted from redundancies in the underlying data representation”. For example, on Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com), a open-source dictionary for slang, there are multiples of every word available because everyone has different definitions for the word. The word “derpes” is, according to the first result, is a transmitted disease, but according to the third definition is “a contagious form of right-wing rhetoric”.

Yelp does a fantastic job of eliminating these redundancies. Because I’m from NorCal, I use Yelp every time I want to find a new place to eat at in LA. My boss recommends me a place and I search on Yelp and never find two or redundancies of whatever he suggests. I recently went to Sushi Gen (which I highly recommend), and before I went I yelped it. Sushi Gen popped up as my top search, and when I click on the restaurant, its page comes up with reviews, tips, location, pictures, etc. Every piece of metadata relating to Sushi Gen is attached to that one Sushi Gen; there are not multiple Sushi Gens.

Additionally, “the purpose of a database is to store information about a particular domain (sometimes called the universe of discourse) and to allow one to ask questions about the state of that domain”. Going along the idea that everything is correlated to what you search for on Yelp, you are able to ask questions about the state of that domain. Let’s pretend that I want a solid dinner date place in Santa Monica that is relatively cheap. Yelp’s efficient metadata filters allows me to search “dinner date” and filter it to Santa Monica and two dollar signs. I have many options – “The Misfit Restauarant + Bar”, “Upper West”, “Fritto Misto Italian Café”, the list goes on. Sushi Gen, for example, would be a search result of a highly rated “sushi” place in Little Tokyo that is on the more expensive side. Yelp is a great example of a successful, user-friendly database.

 

 

Week 3: Screwing with Netflix and Facebook Suggestions

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http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/

A few years ago, I remember scrolling through Netflix and finding a few movies that looked slightly interesting. Now, I have about 5-6 movies on my “to-watch” list at all times. Netflix, the online movie and TV subscription service, currently has over 50 million subscribers globally. In 2006 they had 10 million subscribers. It’s clear that Netflix has grown to be one of the top web apps to date. The question is how they did it – did they improve their movie selection, or did they improve their movie selection suggestions?

We can assume that Netflix did both. However, the more important development was the suggestions. Alexis Madrigal spent several weeks with a group of coworkers pulling apart Netflix’s magic. According to their results presented in the article “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”, Netflix has 76,897 unique ways to describe movies. It all boils down to tags; Netflix has analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show in every possible way imaginable. “When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy”.

There is only one other similar intelligence approach in existence. “Netflix has built a system that really only has one analog in the tech world: Facebook’s NewsFeed”. Both Netflix and Facebook’s NewsFeed operate under the users viewing and liking habits – depending on how you interact with Netflix or Facebook, their algorithms spit out other certain movies or links you might be interested in. But what happens if you mess with this algorithm and like everything?

Mat Honan did. In “I liked Everything I saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here’s What It Did to Me” featured on Wired, Honan explains that after his Like binge, his Facebook NewsFeed became extremely liberal and extremely conservative. None of his friends popped up anymore; it was all advertisements and articles. “As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my NewsFeed, the updates I a saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi’s ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.”

So I did the same thing, but with Netflix and only for 20 minutes. I went to “Personalize” and 5-starred and clicked “interested” for every movie that popped up. On Netflix’s splash page I did the same thing. The difference between Honan and my result’s was that Netflix recycled the movies I already 5-starred. They had no other movies to suggest, no other reserves to pull from. Facebook, on the other hand, has the entire internet to suggest to you. Which ends with a clogged NewsFeed full of stuff that in the end, Honan didn’t like anyways.

Algorithms do an amazing job of feeding consumers stuff that they’d be interested in. But they can be screwed with, and that’s because in the end, they’re robots trying to cater to humans.

Week 2: Metadata and Nutrition

reeses-peanut-butter-400x400

https://www.hersheys.com/reeses/products/reeses-peanut-butter-cups/milk-chocolate.aspx

http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm267499.htm

http://myfitnesspal.com

“Setting the Stage” by Anne J. Gilliland is an introduction to the definition and purpose of metadata. Metadata, or “data about data”, “is understood in different ways by the diverse professional communities that design, create, describe, preserve, and use information systems and resources”. Metadata’s function differs from each metadata standard because Gilliland argues that there is no standard adequate for describing all the collections of data. But it is crucial that metadata is stored and structured in an effective way so the process of retrieving the data is effective, now and in the future. Without the proper storage and maintenance of metadata in databases, it is incredibly difficult to decode information objects and make it public knowledge.

In the early 90s the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to make one of the now most used types of metadata available to the public – nutrition facts. Since 1994 the nutrition fact label has been printed on every sold packaged food product sold in America to help inform customers about the fat, carbohydrates, and sodium content, along with the percentage of daily calories in the given serving size. For example, one of the links above leads us to the nutritional information of a Reeses peanut butter cup. The second link given above is the FDA’s guide on reading a nutrition label. So using the latter to, in a sense, “decode” the nutrition label and turn it into useful data, we find that based on a 2,000 calorie diet, two Reeses peanut butter cups is about 10% of the amount of calories one should be eating per day, 20% of the total fat, 6% of the sodium; the list goes on. Thanks to nutrition fact labels, we know that (unfortunately) eating twenty Reeses peanut butter cups would be doubling the amount of total fat our bodies should be having per day. The nutrition facts act as the metadata, and the labels act as a way to organize this metadata in an effective way so we as consumers now know about exactly what we’re eating.

Another publicly accessibly tool besides the nutrition food label is the database that contains this type of metadata. MyFitnessPal is an open-source database, or record-keeping system, that has most of the world’s nutrition fact labels stored. The web app allows users to add metadata and use the existing metadata to track their daily calories and other nutrition data. MyFitnessPal is an example of giving the public an easy way to access useful metadata to help improve their lives. Nutrition fact labels are an incredibly valuable development, but expanding the storage of metadata in a useful way is the future of informational systems.