workspace

Eduardo Navas: Sampling Culture

Eduardo Navas’ updated Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture provides a sprawling (in a good way) map of remix theory and practice.

The megamix has its roots in the sampling practice of disco and hip hop. While disco in large part experimented with the Extended Remix, hip hop experimented with the Selective and Reflexive Remixes. Grandmaster Flash may be credited with having experimented in 1981 with an early form of the megamix when he recorded “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,”[25] which is essentially an extended mix performed on a set of turntables with the help of music studio production. The recording included songs by The Sugarhill Gang, The Furious Five, Queen, Blondie and Chic.

[via Remix Theory]

University Websites

To be more accurate, you should substitute the title “THINGS PEOPLE WHO READ XKCD GO TO THE SITE LOOKING FOR” (given that most university websites are primarily about marketing or athletics).

[via xkcd]

LEGO Mindstorms-Based Drum Machine

[via createdigitalmusic.com]

Extra-Alphabetical Ordering Systems

Aaron Britt at Dwell Magazine discusses their research office’s practice of organizing books by color.

We’ve organized our bookshelf by color for some time here at Dwell. And to be fair, it looks great. As visitors pass the design wall, the current issue of the magazine tacked up in its unbound state, they’re met with a rack of chromatic harmony. Hell, we even put a picture of the shelf in the March 08 issue of the magazine.

Includes a link to Design Observer’s discussion of various organizational systems for books as well as some images of San Francisco’s Adobe Bookstore much-publicized by-color experiment.

(Personally, I don’t have much of an organizational system beyond saying,

I think it’s on campus.

if I’m at home and

I think it’s at home.

if I’m on campus. If I were actually organized, I’d shift to the by-color method because I can usually visualize the cover of what I’m looking for.

[via http://www.dwell.com/]

Stop, You’re Scaring Tufte

Smashing Magazine has a long, example-packed article misleading graphs and figures, wonderfully titled “Imagine a Pie Chart Stomping on an Infographic Forerver.” Some of the best egregious constructions included multiple offenses, such as the above chart: At first glance you can probably recognize that the background graphic is so busy it tends to obscure the data itself. Worse, the data actually describes changes in crime rates over time. Is Houston more or less violent than New York? You might think the figure is telling you, but it’s just fooling you.

[via Smashing Magazine]

Augmented Reality & Music Marketing

The new Flying Lotus album Cosmogramma [iTunes Store link] release includes a free Windows and Mac augmented reality app, Cosmogramma Fieldlines. Nice.

[via createdigitalmusic.com]

Infographic

Phil Gyford’s Infographic (only a slice of the top shown above) skewers the tendency to create information visualizations that are little but empty (or misguided) rhetorical gestures.

[via Noisy Decent Graphics]

Visualizing Congressional Bills

IBM launches Many Bills, a spinoff of their Many Eyes project. Users browse data bout congressional legislation, create and post visualizations. Promising.

[via information aesthetics]

Tracking Reading

Musical Machinery suggests some interesting stats that Amazon could provide based on Kindle use stats. Here are just a few of those mentioned:

Most Abandoned – the books and/or authors that are most frequently left unfinished. What book is the most abandoned book of all time? (My money is on ‘A Brief History of Time’) A related metric – for any particular book where is it most frequently abandoned? (I’ve heard of dozens of people who never got past ‘The Council of Elrond’ chapter in LOTR).

Burning the midnight oil – books that keep people up late at night.

Read Speed – which books/authors/genres have the lowest word-per-minute average reading rate? Do readers of Glenn Beck read faster or slower than readers of Jon Stewart?

Most Re-read – which books are read over and over again? A related metric – which are the most re-read passages? Is it when Frodo claims the ring, or when Bella almost gets hit by a car?

Dishonest rater – books that most frequently rated highly by readers who never actually finished reading the book.

I think we need more data like this, not just from Kindle but from everything—e-books, iTunes, physical texts (via cheap RFIDs or barcodes), patterns of movement in our homes, etc. We know so little about our own and our culture’s information habitats.

[via kottke.org]

Buy-In and Inertia in User Interface

In an article at UX Magazine, Dominique Leca describes one way that bad user interfaces maintain market share:

The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect
reinforced by the powerful conservative tendencies of the
financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.

Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by
most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride
on manipulating Bloomberg’s current ‘complex’ interface. The pain
inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and
yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding
experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.

I think this explains most of Microsoft’s offerings as well.

[via Daring Fireball]