Test Bundle
Testing a bundle with local image files.
Lynn Cherny (arnicas) Blog
Recent content on Lynn Cherny (arnicas) Blog
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Another_test
A short test of the posting system.
My Test Post
A first test post.
About Me
Lynn Cherny/arnicas short bio and links
New Year, New Update
Yes, still in France... This past year, I primarily worked as 'AI Artist in Residence' at Google Arts & Culture in Paris. With the help of my colleague and talented front-end coder Chris Sugrue, we released a pretty set of haikus illustrated with Google AI Tools. I curated the haikus and created all the content with internal AI generative models, and she wired it all up beautifully (and did the…
Work and Newsletter Updates, Plus a Game and Talk
I'm still in France consulting! I have so far survived the epidemics and heat waves.
Another Year in France (Consulting Again)
It’s that time of year - time for a recap of what I’ve been up to!
Still in France, But On the Market Again!
After 2 years teaching at the business school, my classes had become very popular: hence, huge, and therefore tremendous work to grade and manage. I left that position in October and have been consulting again since. I’m still based in Lyon, but am entertaining offers of other locations and remote work! I’m currently doing NLP data science consulting for a nice client based in London (…
Updates and Links
Teaching A few updates since last year... I am now teaching as an Assoc. Professor of Data Science in Lyon, France, at EM-Lyon Business School . The plan was 2 years and 'we'll see.' I finished year 1 of teaching business analytics, python and python data and text analysis. It was hard but rewarding when I had good students! Talks / Slides Since last year, lots of talks and slide decks! Creative…
Spring Semester D3 Class (take 2)
I reprised my class on interactive visualization with D3.js at University of Miami with twice as many students in the spring semester. It was successful again, but I found it noticeably more work having more students. We did not focus on UNICEF this time; instead each student explored a topic of their own interest. More on how it scaled (or didn’t) after some project highlights…
Fall Student D3.js Projects
Here’s the followup I promised on my post about teaching D3.js to journalism students : A selection from their projects! Their project goal was to produce a data story using UNICEF data (and possibly related data) about child mortality. The grading criteria were pretty rigorously spelled out as follows in Week 14 of the repo:
Teaching a Semester of D3.js
I spent last semester frantically putting together a course on D3.js for journalism students at the University of Miami at the same time as teaching it and grading it. Wow, teaching a semester course is hard. Teaching coding, especially to non-CS students, is a special challenge. I was lucky to have a small class of very patient and motivated guinea pigs students for the first semester.
Knight Projects for the Year
I am installed in Miami for the academic year as a Visiting Knight Chair in the Journalism department; I've been busy (frantically, insanely busy) trying to put together class materials for the semester, grade stuff, produce talks and workshops, and keep up with Twitter.
Teaching News
Overdue for a blog post, and I guess my news needs an official announcement!
A Silly Text Visualization Toy
This little text-to-image replacement toy made me laugh, so I decided to put it up in case it makes you laugh too. In my last project, I did part-of-speech tagging in Python and used that to replace nouns with other nouns (see post and demo ); in this one, I did the part-of-speech tagging all in Javascript using the terrific RiTa.js library!
Visualizing Word Embeddings in Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a weekend web hack can be a lot of work, actually. After my last blog post , I thought I'd do a fast word2vec text experiment for #NaNoGenMo . It turned into a visualization hack, not too surprisingly. The results were mixed, though they might be instructive to someone out there.
A Roundup of Recent Text Analytics and Vis Work
Some really exciting things in text analysis and visualization have crossed my Twitter feed recently; I thought I'd pull together some pointers in case you missed any of my tweetspam about one of my favorite subjects. Maybe posts like this will become a regular thing!
Data Characters in Search of An Author
My last post on Implied Stories was about how we fill in the blanks to create story contexts in even very short works, like Hemingway's example of 'the shortest story every told': 'For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.' In that post, I used Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling and Emma Coats' talk about them at Tapestry Conference , plus some sociology, to frame my points about how audiences find implied…
Implied Stories (and Data Vis)
At the excellent Tapestry Conference in February in Annapolis, Emma Coats ( @lawnrocket ) spoke about storytelling, the theme of the conference. Her talk was based on her internet-famous 22 Rules of Storytelling developed while she was at Pixar. Lacking the video of her talk ([ETA: here it is !]), I cracked open the ebook based on her principles by Stephan Bugaj, Pixar’s 22 Rules of Story (That…
Data Vis Consulting: Advice for Newbies
Every time I give a talk or introduce myself at a conference, someone gets really interested in what I do. When I think I’ve scored a potential client, it turns out they just want to know if they could do what I do. Some folks are direct: One woman at a Python Data Science conference said, “So, you know that job ad list you run for data-vis jobs? How do I get one of those jobs?”
PyData Boston 2013: More On Fiction Analysis
For PyData Boston, I did a recap of parts of my OpenVisConf talk, with some more technical details added, including an IPython notebook of some useful code.
Analysis of Fiction (My OpenvisConf Talk)
Here are the slides from my talk at OpenVisConf in Boston in May! The Bones of a Bestseller: Visualizing Fiction from Lynn Cherny And here is the link to the video (30 mins), which might be funnier than the slides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f41U936WqPM . Finally, I did put most of my visualization tool demos online, which are linked from the talk itself. (These are visualizations I threw…
Data Visualization with Nodebox
For PyData 2013 , I put together a talk on using Nodebox OpenGL for data visualization. My goal was to expose the data science audience to a flexible tool similar to Processing, but that allows one to write in Python and use Python data libraries. (The java-esqueness of Processing has always put me off reaching for it when I’m working, despite a general fondness for it. I still own every…
My Upcoming Talks, Spring 2013
I’ve got a busy few months ahead! Here’s where I’ll be speaking…
Strata NYC 2012 and PyData
A week ago, I gave a talk at Strata NYC on network visualization ('Beyond the Hairball'). The talk had many technical issues (I'm new to using a MBP and Keynote to present), but the slides seem to have had some kind of life on Twitter. So here's the rather large and slightly academic deck:
UK Bestsellers: Remash By Genre and Gender
You know how you have a giant collection of datasets saved, but you never seem to get to them? The Guardian Datablog posted one that moved me from my usual weekend lethargy. Not about some world injustice, a critical healthcare issue, or anything Genuinely Important – but UK book sales data , checking into whether Fifty Shades of Grey is really the UK’s bestselling book of all time. I…
Captain America is Getting Some (In the Fanfic)
What could be more appropriate for July 4th than Captain America? If you've seen the movies a lot already, and you're wanting more, there's always the fan fiction. Of which there is a lot. I admit, I read it. And I got a little data curious over the weekend.* WARNING: Look away now if the idea of hot boy-on-boy superhero action makes you queasy, because there's a lot of such hotness in the…
Eyeo 2012: Processing My Data Vis PTSD
As an ex-researchy type, I'm used to the papers and speakers at conferences like Infovis , the academic visualization conference that meets during IEEE Visweek ; but last week's Eyeo Festival was... different. In the past few years, I've been to a handful of the former-Flash-community's digital art conferences (such as Geeky By Nature and Flashbelt ). They inspired me, made me think about the…
My Most Influential One Pixel Line
I thought I'd contribute one story to the 'telling stories with data' genre, even if it's a silly one. It's silly 'cuz it features such a silly graph, which I shoved into an appendix of a presentation for a client a few years ago. Here's an anonymized version: I put that animation with the arrow in there on purpose, because when I presented it, I had to point out the skinny line on the top. More…
Digging Into NetworkX and D3
For Boston's Predictive Analytics Meetup in February, I gave a short talk on using the python library NetworkX to analyze social network link data, illustrated with some simple D3.js visuals of the results. I've since spruced up the slides to stand on their own a bit better, extended a few of the examples, and moved it all online.
A Kindle Fire Review (from a Media Fan)
I'm a Kindle fan, and an Amazon fan. I really like their media content: I buy Amazon music, Amazon Kindle books, TV shows, Android apps. So when my Kindle Fire came, it was pretty much pre-loaded, and that was really nice. All my stuff is sitting there with a little 'download to device' arrow, which rocks. I got this thing because of upcoming travel over the holidays (I don't own an iPad, I think…
A Personal Take on Infovis 2011
I haven’t had time to go thru the papers I liked and didn’t like yet, but I have been musing on some other aspects of Infovis that I thought I’d recap. To situate this, I usually go every other year to Infovis, and have been doing so since mid-2000’s, I guess.
Combing Through the Infovis Twitter Network Hairball
A month or two ago, Moritz Stefaner posted this image of “infovis” folks on twitter, with nodes sized by number of followers (“in-degree”):
PyCon 2011 - Data, Men, and Me
In the past couple years, I’ve switched from sending myself to research conferences (like CHI) to more down-and-dirty developery conferences. I’m looking for skills development and tools I can use day-to-day. This spring I went to PyCon in Atlanta, since I’ve been using Python more and more for data analysis problems. (Complete talk videos are here on blip.tv .) The initial draw…
Fan Video Editing Community and Copyright
In April, I gave a talk at UIUC’s HCI department on fan video remix artists, or “vidders,” as they are known within the fan media community. To build the talk, I drew on several years of LiveJournal network data, and a large 2-part survey I did in the spring of 2010 to document current attitudes, trends, and self-reported demographics of the community. Afterwards, I made my…
My Take on Big Company Suckage
Scott Berkun wrote a good post on Why Big Companies Suck , at popular request on his site. It made me think about my own experiences at small, medium, and large companies over the past 20 years. I’m assuming Scott and his readers were mostly talking about “why it often sucks to WORK at a big company,” rather than why big companies suck from the outside looking in.
Tips and Tidbits from the UI14 Conference
Back to blogging after a long hiatus of work and travel… UI14 in Boston had some good stuff for designers and managers! I heard a lot about techniques for creativity and design generation before winnowing; good reminders to generate multiple approaches before “settling.”
Recent Consulting Links
A few articles on consulting in the current economic climate, thanks to the Freelancers Union newsletter:
Cheap and Interesting Travel Resources
Since I’ve been busy vacationing, I haven’t been busy blogging much - so I thought maybe I’d update with some references for travel sites and lists I use. A few friends have asked me for tips, so here is the collected recent lot.
In Defense of Hard Skills for Designers
The other day I was in a meeting in which evaluation criteria for developers came up; nice concrete stuff, like writing code that other people can read and modify, putting in comments, resulting bugs, etc. It made me pause and admire the local weather of that strange country. In my experience, it’s vanishingly rare for an interaction designer, usability specialist, or User Experience…
Why Failure Isn't Working for Me
A response to a number of posts and talks on failure recently, particularly this one by Michael Krigsman, Five Reasons to Discuss Project Failure , linked from Scott Berkun's blog .
CHI 09 Panel: Moving UX Into Strategic Importance
At CHI 2009, I took a lot of notes at the panel “Figuring Out the ‘One Thing’ That Will Move UX Into a Position of Strategic Importance." This is a rather random summary of it; see a similar topic in my post on User Experience Organizations discussed at BostonCHI a couple years ago.
So You Need to Do a Usability Test... But the Product So Obviously Sucks.
Most of us in interaction design jobs have been asked to do a usability test on something that we don’t think is ready for prime time. You think it needs some design work before it even gets to users. The usual scenario is that your company or client is unwilling to listen to another stakeholder with design opinions (yours, or your team’s), but will believe it coming from users. Either…
R, for Open Source Data Goodness
After I left The MathWorks, I stopped being able to afford MATLAB for stats, and switched to the open source R . Recently, there have been a few articles on how R is being used at companies like Google and Facebook ( here and here ). I thought I’d post some names of books and sites to help out those new to R.
CAD is Just a Tool: SolidWorks World 2009
The guest speakers at SolidWorks World 2009 really brought home to me how wonderful a rigorous design process can be - driving the product development, rather than struggling to catch up! There were 3 guest speakers that hammered on this: Sir Richard Branson of Virgin , and design managers from New Balance and Sony Ericsson.
Brainstorming Doesn't Necessarily Help
At my last permanent job, an expert on brainstorming techniques came in to give a talk to the design and development managers. See, we had a phase of our dev process we optimistically called “brainstorming,” the tiny moment in which ideas should be generated–regardless of plausibility and regardless of source–for the problems we wanted to address in the release. I think I…
Why Consulting Might Be For You
Last week Greg Raiz and I did a half day version of our workshop on being a design consultant, which we call “Getting Started in Consulting: Being the Best Boss You Ever Had.” In this economic climate, I wasn’t entirely sure we should be recommending striking out on your own, but there are still some themes that work whatever the current job market.
Animated Drawings (and Meta There-upon)
Today I ran across a whole class of items that are oddly similar, in different places: drawings animated, in not your usual way.
My (Renewed) Love Affair With Amazon: Video and Kindle Books
I remember when people sniffed at the idea of Amazon being more than books. When Jeff Bezos reinvested all his profit into opening up other shops, people said, “Diluting the brand?” and other naive things–I might have been one of them.
Jobs for a Stressed Economy: Smashing Stuff, and Psychics
What do you do when you’re stressed? You can pay to throw things, at Sarah’s SmashShack in San Diego. Sarah’s site says you can come alone or in groups, and throw crockery and other nice breakables in her special smashing rooms. Along with whatever soundtrack you prefer.