Hello everyone!  It’s been a while.  Blog posts are like college essays for me (they’re never “done”), so you’ll have to bear with me while I try to bang this one out before the day gets too terribly late.

On Monday, I gave a presentation at Notre Dame on the role of the academic library in supporting social sciences research.  I put my slides on SlideShare and I’ll put them here, as well, with a little more detail.  I warn you, someone whose presentations I admire told me it’d be a good idea if my slides were *very* incomplete without my narration (thanks, aaron! your post was just in time), but the slides do contain references and other links. 

You can also download the .ppt from the SlideShare page.

Basically, data is huge.  Visualization as a tool for understanding the data we’re surrounded by has really exploded in the past few years.  There are a bunch of web services that will let you upload data sets and visualize them.  More and more researchers (undergrads, grad students, professors) are going to aim for the insight that visualization can bring.  

The library has a role in fulfilling these data needs — help with data services shouldn’t be holed up in one institute or department that researchers aren’t sure if they can or should use.  The library is for everyone, is funded for everyone, and is a place where everyone in the campus community can go to get help with their research.   This is also an excellent opportunity for libraries to advocate for the use of social sciences data – to spark interest in data, data analysis, and the beauty of visualization to an academic population that is already increasingly immersed in data themselves.

I’ll end with these links and a plea for you to let me know what you come up with if you start using any of these visualization services to manipulate your data!

data visualization services

mycrocosm: ”a web service that allows you to share snippets of information from the minutae of daily life.”

data360: “Data360 is a non-profit, non-partisan organization helping people and organizations clarify issues that are of importance to them. Issues can be local, regional, national or international… business, economics, sports, arts, social or environmental… personal, group or organizational.”

swivel: data visualization, data set sharing, exploration.

manyeyes: IBM project “for shared visualization and discovery.”

the new york times visualization lab: data from NYT, visualization fueled by manyeyes

data blogs & sites

dataspora: “the evolving economics of data” by Michael E. Driscoll and Jason R. Morton.

flowingdata: “strength in numbers.”

datawrangling: “machine learning, data mining, and more” by Peter Skomoroch. 

junk charts: a very entertaining look at what happens when good data goes bad.

IASSIST communique: “IASSIST is an international organization of professionals working in and with information technology and data services to support research and teaching in the social sciences.”

other tools: what is data, where to find it

readwriteweb.com - Where to Find Open Data on the Web (a ton of useful links)

Peter Skomoroch’s dataset bookmarks @ delicious – that’s what social bookmarking is all about, right?

infochimps.org: “free redistributable rich data sets.”

datamob.org: “public data put to good use.”

numbrary: “Numbrary is a free online service dedicated to finding, using and sharing numbers on the web.”

ICPSR: “Established in 1962, ICPSR is the world’s largest archive of digital social science data. We acquire, preserve, and distribute original research data and provide training in its analysis. We also offer access to publicationsbased on our data holdings.”

ICPSR’s Online Learning Center: “ICPSR’s Online Learning Center (OLC) supports quantitative literacy in the social sciences by providing an effective and reliable means of bringing secondary data into the classroom.”

Social Explorer: maps and reports on census data, but not a whole lot of interactivity.

Library Trends 30 (3) Winter 1982: Data Libraries for the Social Sciences: 1982! A collection of articles based about social sciences data + libraries. From 1982.

What is Social Science Data? @ UCLA

An interesting thing is happening at the intersection of two of my favorite things — heavy metal and video games.  Metallica’s new album, Death Magnetic, was recently made available in its entirety for download and play within Guitar Hero III.  

If you’re not familiar with Guitar Hero, it’s a music game where a player with a guitar-shaped controller can “play” songs by holding buttons on the guitar neck (like frets) and simultaneously strumming a strum bar on the body of the guitar.  It’s a big hit, and it’s a lot of fun for a lot of people.  If you want to know more about it, I’m sure you can search for “Guitar Hero” on YouTube and get a hundred videos of people showing off how good they are. 

Interactivity and huge sales aside, Metallica’s new album has been criticized for its sub-par production value. You can read a bit about it at the Wikipedia entry for Death Magnetic, and the cited links therein.  

What’s interesting about this situation is that fans, probably within hours (don’t quote me, I’m just guessing) of Death Magnetic’s release for Guitar Hero, noticed that the GH III release of the album didn’t have the same sound problems as the official CD release.  Accordingly, some enthusiastic people ripped the GH III version to FLAC format and made it available on the internet.  This is what the info file for the unofficial FLAC release states:

Lineage: Xbox 360 optical out > Firewire 410 > Audacity (.wav) > dbPowerAmp (.flac w/ verify)

Notes: This rip was created because of the backlash over the sound quality of the official release of Death Magnetic.  A few astute folks found that the versions available for download on Guitar Hero III did not suffer from the compression and clipping that plauge the official release, so a project was launched to rip the GH III versions to a lossless format.  This is the result of that project.  As for the sound: this rip is noticeably quieter than the official release; the levels were not boosted because there were already peaks in the waveforms that were close to 0dB.  The only way to adjust the volume would be to compress the tracks, which would have been difficult to justify given the purpose of this project.

While this isn’t exactly a case of music 2.0 — fans didn’t get the master tracks and re-master the album the way they want it, they simply noted that the Guitar Hero folks took the master tracks and did something better with them than could be heard on the official release — it is an interesting case of fans seeing something inadequate, finding an instance of improvement (in an interactive video game!), and making it widely available through audio technology and the internet.  

Having heard both the original CD release and the GH III FLAC files, I can definitely tell you that the GH III mix of the album is a vast improvement over the official release.  I reviewed the official album at length on Facebook, and a lot of the problems I took issue with — Lars’ drumming sounding like it’s in a tin can; James’ lack of singing ability being mixed far too loud — almost don’t even exist in the GH III mix.  The GH III version isn’t perfect (not even in lossless audio) and it’s still not ideally mixed for my tastes (does anyone want to give me the master tracks? and get me the ones for … And Justice For All, while you’re at it!), but the whole album takes on a much better tone, and I might have received the whole work more positively had this been the version I heard initially instead of the compressed, clipped, and brick-walled official release.

This whole thing isn’t legal at all — I’m sure that technically, you’d have to buy the GH III version of the album to legally posess the .flac files, and I’m not even sure about the legal issues surrounding ripping digital audio files from a game for listening outside of the game itself.  That isn’t something we discuss in LIS 550, probably because it’s never happened on a scale like this before.  But I’m glad for it.  I’m glad there’s another audio distribution channel (in the form of interactive music gaming, no less) that can make this kind of thing possible and increase fans’ appreciation of an album.  I can’t even imagine how much better it would be if Metallica (like Peter Gabriel did with “Shock the Monkey”) made available the Death Magnetic master tracks and crowdsourced their hundreds of thousands of fans to re-mix the album in interesting ways.  Sure there would be some atrocities — some things Metallica never intended and some things nobody should ever hear — but I bet a lot of it would be beautiful.  I don’t want to wait around for music 2.0.  I want everyone to be able to re-master Metallica as they see fit right now.

So I can make some really good muffins.  And I want to tell you how.  Except that I don’t pretend to know a secret about how to make really good muffins — this is so dead simple that it’s ridiculous.  But I didn’t figure it out until now, so I figure there are other people who haven’t figured it out yet.

One thing about them is that they’re filled with healthy things.  If you don’t like healthy foods, you probably won’t like them.  I don’t like to “watch what I eat” but I do like to eat whole grains all the time.  My favorite foods are spinach and edamame (which I have thankfully been able to talk myself out of putting into muffins so far) and I am continually astounded at how amazing fruit is.  It was such a great idea to wrap seeds in that kind of deliciousness.  So that’s where I’m coming from with the food I eat.  The recipe is vegan if you skip the honey.

Another thing about them is that they’re small, but loaded with calories because that’s what three kinds of grains and a good bit of oil will do to a muffin.  They run 160 cal/muffin at the least.

Here is what’s in them:

dry:

• 1 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/3 cup turbinado sugar crystals (you want the big chunky kind and you can cut down the sugar if you want but don’t substitute - crunchy molasses-y crystals are the best)
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp salt

wet:

• 1 tablespoon ground flax seed + 3 tablespoons water (this is an egg substitute — you can replace it with 1 egg if you want)
• 2/3 cup vanilla soy milk (or possibly regular milk, but I’ve never tried that)
• 1/3 cup olive oil (or whatever kind of oil you like best)
• honey to taste (you don’t need honey — I just put a little in because I like the idea of honey)
• 1/2 - 1 cup dried fruit things or nuts — raisins, walnuts, apricots, wheat berries, etc.

baking instructions:

find a good album to measure, mix, and bake to.

combine the dry ingredients and mix them well.

combine the wet ingredients and mix them well.

put the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and just mix until all the dry parts are wettened.

fold in extras.

fill 12 cup muffin tin.  you can’t “pour” the batter — just spoon it in all chunky and and even it out.

bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

cool for 10 minutes.

eat.

pictured with: 1 cup raisins + walnuts + wheat berries; measured, mixed, and baked to Exile on Main St.

I got really excited over a few things relating to MGS4 lately.

First, I found out I could take pictures in-game (click to go to the flickr page for a long winded description) and transfer them to a storage device and then post them all over my blog, which is just crazy to me.  Has anyone in the history of ever made it this easy to screenshot something off a console? on purpose? ever?  I think it’s a beautiful feature and I can’t wait to use it more.  I can’t even count the number of times I’ve wanted to take in-game pictures of things (Half-Life 2, I am looking at you) and been unable.  Hopefully this kind of feature will keep showing up in important games.

Then, Sony announced and subsequently delivered the Metal Gear Solid Database, which is even better than described.  And it’s free.  Here is a preview of it. I haven’t seen a lot of buzz about it now that it’s been released, but, personally (as an information nerd who loves games), I’m still amazed every time I look at it.  All of that information in a beautiful system — and all for free — with the MGS4 spoilers blocked out until you finish the game.  Beautiful, and genius, and considerate, to boot!

Witchfinder General - Buried Beneath the Ruins Green vinyl; includes the Burning a Sinner 7″; incredible booklet; the most beautiful gatefold I’ve ever seen; etc.;etc.;etc.

Witchcraft - The Alchemist Magnolia sparkle vinyl; incredible artwork; beautiful music.

The Witchfinder General LP came with a turntable mat.  This is the White Stripes on top of it.

Some more records.

I built my first ever wordpress theme to match my new website.

I widgetized my sidebar, but the default Search button is so ugly.  I may have to fix it, but I’m all tired now and just testing this to make sure it all works for the time being.