This morning’s Times had a lit­tle write-up on IBM’s many-eyes.com, with an empha­sis on the ben­e­fits of col­lab­o­ra­tive data visualization.

I’ll be teach­ing a work­shop on Processing in just two weeks here in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area and would like to learn how to get your com­puter to do really neat stuff, learn more about the work­shop here. Space is lim­ited, but don’t worry—if you can’t make this one, there will be many more com­ing soon!

Thanks to every­one at NoiseBridge for their encour­age­ment, sup­port, and assistance.

Wednesday was the first day of the semes­ter at UC Berkeley, where I attended the first lec­ture in my Visualization course. In it, the pro­fes­sor was oblig­ated to men­tion John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera deaths near the Broad Street pump in London.

It’s a land­mark work in the fields of both visu­al­iza­tion and epi­demi­ol­ogy. But I was still sur­prised when, the next day, explor­ing my local used book­store, I came across The Ghost Map, a book that recounts every detail of the epi­demic and Snow’s path toward dis­cov­er­ing its means of trans­mis­sion. I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing about how Snow came upon the insight to use a visu­al­iza­tion — a map, in this case — to con­vince oth­ers of his the­ory that the dis­ease was car­ried in water, and that the Broad Street pump was the source of so many infec­tions. (In case you haven’t heard the story, his visual argu­ment was a suc­cess. The pump’s han­dle was removed, so the peo­ple had to look else­where, to uncon­t­a­m­i­nated sources, for water.)

Ted Nelson’s dream has finally been real­ized by artist Joe Davis with his Telescopic Text.

If only I had taken my early antic­i­pa­tion project, extended it into the third dimen­sion, and thought to make it more game-like, I might have ended up with some­thing like Coign of Vantage.