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.