I know we mentioned it briefly in our post earlier this week about the design update to the Crimespotting project, but I'm so excited about how the project relates to day vs. night that I want to address it a little more directly:
It's pretty good: you can view crimes by time, turning hours on and off one by one, or using a couple different settings: morning commute, happy hour, police swing shift, etc. So that's good, and better than what we had before (and most of what else I've seen online). But!
I've looked under the hood at how a few police departments look at crime, and from what I can tell, most of them use a pretty straightforward mechanism for looking activity in there area, based on the three shift system: day shift (8am to 4pm), night shift (4pm to midnight), and swing shift (midnight to 8am). Reports will say "crime is up on the night shift this month," things like that. It seems to be institutionalized enough an approach that Mike told me about an urban myth where, since the cops at 4pm are either driving back to or leaving the station, you can commit any crime you want between 3:45 and 4:15 pm and there's nothing they can do about it! (snickers, passes doob)
In any event there doesn't seem to be much out there that takes into account not only the time that a crime has happened, but also how light it was outside. It feels intuitively correct that more crime happens when it's dark, and we didn't really have a way to figure this out on an ongoing basis, until now. Each of the images above is from a different month in 2008, and you can see that the amount of time that it's dark and light changes over the year. And selecting "day" or "night" in the interface will do something different in May than it does in December, since there's more light in May. And this potentially has an impact on how you view crime over time, at least I think it does.
I'm imagining a Gladwellian situation where, in a stroke of brilliant intuitive analysis, standard crime thinking is upended, as a bright splash of crime emerges out of the data relative to twilight over the year, not time of day... Anyhow, someone hit the Crimespotting API and figure that out, wouldja?
We're happy to release two updates to the interactive map that address our most frequent feedback requests: you can now filter crime reports by time of day, and link to and view custom reports for the last two years of crime in Oakland.
Hours
The interface we've created to navigate through the hours of the day is something we're calling the “time pie”, a small circle not unlike a pie chart, with the full 24 hour cycle around its perimeter. Noon is at the top, midnight is at the bottom, 6pm and 6am to the left and right. Hours of sunlight are shown as a slight shading in the background of the circle, and these update according to what day you've selected. The hours of the time pie can be individually switched on and off, and you can also click and drag it to enable or disable a range of hours. Any time span can be selected, and we've added a set of buttons that show a few time slices that we think are particularly meaningful:
Hours of daylight and darkness based on local sunset and sunrise times
Commute hours for the morning and evening
Nightlife hours spanning happy hour to last call
Three police shifts: day, night, and swing
We're hoping these categories will broaden the project's reach, and make it that much more useful to both the public and the police alike. The last time slices (day, night and swing) are the ways that the police view this information, and one thing we hope will come from the project is a better understanding of how the police view their data as it's collected.
We think the time pie is better than anything else out there in the online crime mapping world- as far as we know, Crimespotting is the only site to offer a filter for specific hours of the day on an interactive map - please leave a comment below if you know different.
Days
We've also upgraded the the map's date slider to include data all the way back to our summer 2007 launch. You can now page back and forth week by week using the two large arrows to the left and right of the date slider, and you will also find drop-down menus to quickly jump to a particular month and year in the past. Finally, there's a button that will navigate to the most recent week of report information.
Years
The data for the new years-long timespan is something we've always kept, but we were reluctant to display it on the site because we lacked a good method for visually navigating it. With the introduction of these hour and day widgets, it now makes sense for us to open the entirety of our archives stretching back to the middle of 2007. This means that old URLs for static representations of crime reports are now newly available, as well as a complete catalog of all reports made available to us in the Police Department's nightly spreadsheets.
Links
The long and the short of this new version is that it's much easier to see and link to a broad range of times and dates. In particular, it's now possible to navigate and link to recent newsworthy events like the assassination of journalist Chauncey Bailey, the Oscar Grant riots from January 2009, and the Lovelle Mixon incident from this past March. You can also retrieve data in spreadsheet form for individual police beats for any time in the past, helpful for a longer term understanding of neighborhood crime patterns.
Together, these two additions to the site make for a richer, more useful historical document and local watchdog tool. Please let us know what you think.
Well, seeing as we've got a President who's asserting the necessity of science (and that it will no longer be subject to political ideology, hooray, what a rock we've been under for the past eight years, doesn't the day feel brighter?)..
...it feels like as good a day as any to announce Stamen's new work with the California Academy of Science, a map-based browser of their stunning new space in Golden Gate Park:
Which comes complete with a sexy little slider that lets you ride up and down the elevator through the multistory rain forest, up to the roof, down to the below ground giant fish tanks...
Go, enjoy! Even beter, go to the museum & see it for yourself, it's a wonderful spot.
While you're there, take a look at Icon's review of LocalProject's (whoops) LocalProject's excellent Tourist Information Center in New York, a project (and studio) I've been paying close attention to for a while. Congratulations Jake!
Dopplr co-founder, blogger and all-around smartie (as well as Stamen advisor and pal) Matt Jones has posted a talk he gave as part of Umeå Institute of Design's Spring Summit 2009. It's chock full of interesting material, including someStamen projects, as well as the Archimedes Palimpsest, Kevin Kelly's Quantified Self, data patinas, Bruce Sterling's keyboard, Radiohead's House of Cards, and Adam Greenfield's Everyware, and a part of me wishes I had written this instead of him (cause I think it's really good! and I could only get so far as to talk about the intersection of analysis and spectacle), so here it is:
Our friends at Flickr ("almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world") have launched Stamen's new project with them, Flickr Clock. It's a browser for the videos that people have recently started uploading to the site. They're arranged chronologically, and drawn from videos that people have posted to the flickrclock group on flickr.
The pool is quickly filling up with the usual Flickr brilliance: shadows, windmills, kangaroos, an almost casual "look at all this great stuff we have" that this community excels at providing. It will eventually autoplay, so you can sit back and let the user-generated goodness just wash on over you; sort of like Neave Television without all the wierd cat stuff.
The bottom of the interface lets you scroll back and forth in time, so you can get a broader sense of what the community's been posting:
And the slivers are sized according to the original size that the video was when it was posted, so you get all this lucious user-based variance:
It's been great to be working with Flickr again; it's been a while since we did the Nikon Stunning Gallery:
Flickr clock is our second project with the talented Sha Hwang, whom close watchers will have noticed in our recent new studio portrait and who's been working with us in the studio since September. I'm a bit behind on blogging so I'll leave it at that for right now, but hope to have Sha's other project and hopefully a bio of the newest Stamen online soon.
Stamen's had two nice pieces of press lately. We were featured among Esquire's "new cartographers" (along with Laura Kurgan and Sense Networks) in their "Best and Brightest" issue (out now - it's the one with Vince Vaughan on the cover), for our recent SFMOMA Artscope project. And the studio is the subject of an essay in this quarter's Contagious Magazine. Huzzah!
They're both nice pieces—I'm particularly happy that the editors of both magazines took the time to talk with our clients at Trulia, Digg, LOCOG, and SFMOMA for the articles. The Contagious article in particular (8 pages!) is the best and longest overview of the studio's work and working process that I've seen: it really goes into depth on the relation that exploratory work like Crimespotting has to the overall picture of what we're doing, talks about the value of using data visualization to help brand companies as trustworthy, and there's even a nod to the flower-based cross-pollinating impulse that gave us our name. Jess Greenwood's graciously provided us with a pdf of the article; find the whole thing here. It's a lush and beautiful magazine; you can subscribe here.
We're having what we hope will be the first of many semi-regular Friday happy hours at our studio tonight from 6 to 9; if you'd like to come, please RSVP here so we know how much Zubrowka to lay in.
I'll be giving a talk with Kevin O'Malley of Tech Talkthis Wednesday, November 12 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. It's a new kind of venue for me—Kevin describes the Club as more downtown San Francisco than South Park—and I'm really looking forward to getting some of Stamen's ideas out in front of the business community.
The title of the talk is Beyond the Web We Know: What Comes After 2.0? I'll be talking about how Stamen's work with visualizing vast, live and deep data sets can serve as a guide to what's coming. I hope to touch on some of Mike's and Kevin's ideas about what 2.5 looks like, where the activities of small groups in a financial downturn are the real places to watch for innovation.
If you're in San Francisco, please consider yourself invited. You can buy tickets here.
Also, Mike's just back from a whirlwind trip to Tokyo, where he gave by all accounts a rousing talk at Web Directions East; it all happened so fast that I didn't get the chance to announce it before he left and came back.
I'm really pleased with how this project's turned out; in particular I've not seen a map like this before that gives a sense of the relative speed that a storm moves at (take a look at how Gustav slows down as it passes over the southwest coast of Haiti). It's not something I've really ever thought about before, but now that I've seen it, I'll be looking for it in every other map like this I see—which is just how I like to change the world. Congratulations to Tom and Geraldine for pulling this one together.
This is the first time that we've released something this concrete. At dinner last night Lane told me that it was the first time he'd seen something that Stamen had done that was going to really matter to him in 72 hours. We've historically shied away from doing work that's overly predictive and analytical, preferring to focus on the lyrical and metaphorical aspects of visualization. This is the first time you can make a decision based on something we've built, and I'm glad we seem to have crossed that barrier without fretting too much about it. Just about every big decision I've ever made that's turned out well has been made in lightness and in haste; no sense stopping now!
I was at Burning Man during Katrina, and I'll never forget the sinking feeling in my heart when people started arriving towards the event with copies of the New York Times showing New Orleans under water. I'm in London now, even farther away, but now watching and hoping that things go better for that beautiful city this time.
Back in February I was happy to announce that Cabspotting, our project with Scott Snibbe and Amy Balkin, was to be included in the Museum of Modern Art's forthcoming Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition. In the meantime, the MoMA has decided to acquire the version of the piece that we made for the exhibit, titled "Cabspotting Flow: New Years Eve 2007," for their permanent collection.
'Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917, I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, "That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water—H20 (not Hπ0). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am looking at stretching miles astern?"
'I began to make calculations of how many bubbles there were per cubic foot of water. I began to find that in calculating the ship's white wake I was dealing in quintillions to the fourth power times quintillions to the fourth power or some such fantastically absurd number of bubbles. And nature was making those bubbles in sublimely swift ease!
'Any time one looks carefully at a bubble, one is impressed with the beauty of its structure, its beautiful sphereicity glinting with the colors of the spectrum. It is ephemeral—elegantly conceived, beautifully manufactured and easily broken.
'Inasmuch as the kind of mathematics I had learned of in school required the use of the XYZ coordinate system and the necessity of placing π in calculating the spheres, I wondered, "to how many decimal places does nature carry out π before she decides that the computation can't be concluded?" Next I wondered, "to how many aribtrary decimal places does nature carry out the transcendental irrational before she decides to say it's a bad job and call it off?" If nature uses π she has to do what we call fudging of her design which means improvising, compromisingly. I thought sympathetically of nature's having to make all those myriad frustrated decisions each time she made a bubble. I didn't see how she managed to formulate the wake of every ship while managing the rest of the universe if she had to make all those decisions. So I said to myself, "I don't think nature uses π. I think she has some other mathematical way of coordinating her undertakings.""
There's something here that I like very much (aside from how funny it is to picture the übernerd standing on the back of a ship counting bubbles); that there's a model of the world that we generally use and which is enough to get by, but isn't quite right, and that if you disregard that model and consider the qualities of the material itself, you realize that there's a whole different approach which can be much more fruitful. When Stamen's working on a project we start by taking a good close look at the data itself and seeing what conclusions emerge, rather than coming up with an external idea which we need to slot the data into, and doing it this way help us avoid having to come up with pi-like approximations which are awkward and inelegant.
It's this kind of thinking which led to things like Fuller's Dymaxion Map: why spend all your time trying to fit a round globe onto a single flat sheet, when it makes more sense to break it into triangles and arrange them however you need them? A while ago Mike made what I think is a particularly elegant interactive version of Fuller's project, which he's called the faumaxion map (and which you can read more about here):
Stamen's new work with awesome real estate powerhouse Trulia (who're going gangbusters btw) is live, at http://snapshot.trulia.com. It's an interactive map (of course!) showing photos of homes for sale, and lets you browse across several vectors: most expensive, least expensive, newest on the market, and longest on the market.
One of the things we strive for in our work is to get out of the way of the data that we're working with. The data is the real stuff as it were—and it should be allowed to sing on its own terms. Another way of saying this is that the world itself is much more interesting than any logos or graphics we could lay on top of it. Our faith is that the world is a fascinating place, and that revealing what that world looks like is both worth doing and fun.
What we've tried to do here is to make the photos of the houses themselves the thing that you interact with, and at the same time strike a balance with the map beneath, so that you can get an understanding of the ways that different kinds of homes relate to the landscape. We tried to go more glossy-real-estate-magazine than executive-dashboard; the results are here.
Oh! And there's a 'play' button (Trulia's suggestion; it's so nice to have clients that are smarter than you), so you can kick back & watch your dream home (or foreclosed shacks) stream by. We're' proud to have worked with Ryan Alexander on this one.
The slides are online here. It was an interesting format to try and get ideas across in; 5 minutes is not very long, and 15 seconds a slide doesn't give you much room to develop anything complicated. But sort of like when I stood up for 6 hours at PC Forum talking to people about Mappr, it's the kind of thing that really teaches you how to get your ideas across, and I'm grateful to Brady for the experience.
I'm particularly pleased to be able to talk a bit about Etienne-Jules Marey, a 19th century French physiologist, photographer and inventor who's something of a hero of mine, and whose work I'm increasingly starting to see as a source of inspiration for the work we do at Stamen. He was among the first to systematically investigate movement and how it can be captured and reproduced, and in addition to his work being scientifically revolutionary it's just plain gorgeous (that's him, below). Something to aspire to. And I have to confess that the pictures of him doing scientific experiments in snazzy suits and hats don't hurt, either.
I'm doing an Ignite session tonight at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame. I've never done an Ignite before: the idea is you have 20 slides and 20 slides only, and they auto-advance every 15 seconds, and 15 seconds only. Usually when I talk, I start warming up after the first 10 minutes, so it should be interesting to take my by-now-familiar caffeine-fueled ranting style about beautiful maps and condense it down into the essentials:
Mapping Now: Dynamic Realtime Maps and Other Pictures Maps are never pefect representations of reality, and increasingly they're out of date before they're finished. Complicating matters, mapping of live phenomena (geospatial or otherwise) is becoming more and more prevelant, and even expected. Looking back to earlier representations of movement can help us figure out how to represent the fluid spaces that mapping is moving in to.
The talk is open to the public, and is at the SFO Marriott tonight at 7pm.
Some Other Goodness:
Mike and Tom have posted notes from their Visual Urban Data: A Journey Through Oakland Crimespotting talk at the Berkeley School of Information. It was a different kind of format than we usually do, and it's great for me to see a whole talk given over to a single project (usually we do a more wham-bam overview of our work). Mike's slides are here, and Tom's are here. My favorite of the bunch is this one, where Mike shows all the different icons that the official Oakland crime map uses to show the different kinds of crimes:
Gotta love those 8-bit syringes!
Mike gave a followup talk at the ISchool to a group of journalists, and videos of that talk are online here and here, or you can watch them below:
"The Frank Sinatra of data visualization," HA! Thanks, Regine.
And finally, there's a Guardian article talking about how Boris Johnson, newly elected Lord Mayor of London, has made his promise of live crime maps for London a core part of his campaign. We'll be watching (and maybe participating in?) this closely, for sure. It's really happening...
Recent developments in technology are expanding the ways we communicate the concept of "where." Online mapping and info-graphic applications are allowing artists, amateurs, and armchair cartographers to chart the intangibility of "place," etching their own impressions, emotions, and experiences onto the physical world around them. Embracing this new paradigm, the artists in this exhibit are charting unique territories while working towards the development of an emerging visual language that connects place, moment, and emotion across varied scales. Where is expanding. W(e are )here.
Stamen's Tom Carden has put together a custom view onto the Twin Cities' unique pattern of housing development for the show (based on our work with awesome real estate aggregator Trulia), and I'm giving a lecture on "Visualizing Urban Data Streams" at the University of Minnesota this evening, delivered in my by-now-familiar rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness hand-wavy style. So if you like interactive animations where cities bloom and spread like some incredibly long-lived malevolent flower, go see the show; if you like watching a guy in a suit rave about why it's interesting, come to the lecture. Come to both!
Tom and I are heading down to San Diego tomorrow for O'Reilly's ETech. We're both speaking, but on separate mornings: Tom's running a workshop and I'm giving a brief morning keynote. Tom's taken on the demanding task of doing a three hour(!) workshop and providing a comprehensive review of what we've been up to for the last few years, and I've really enjoyed seeing a view on our projects as thoughtful as his. I've got the easy job; all I have to do is get up on stage and show 15 minutes of the sexy stuff.
This will be my first ETech, so I'm not really sure what to expect. It's got a reputation as the ultimate nerd-fest, which is a bit intimidating, but means there'll be alot to learn. I'm optimistic that the O'Reilly people seem to be living up to their reputation as framing "the ideas, projects, and technologies lurking just below the mainstream radar." moving away from the straight up "Web 2.0" topics which seem to have moved well up above the mainstream radar by now.
The show is a survey of work at the intersection of design and science, and from what I know, the roster of participants reads like a who's who of people I've admired for a long time (although I can't seem to find a list of them on the web anywhere - MoMA?). It's nice company to be in. From the exhibition catalog:
"In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.
"The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue."
While Cabspotting is going to be actually hanging in the MoMA (holy f**k!), I'm also gratified by the inclusion of our work with Digg in the exhibition's printed catalog, and that Graffiti Archaeology and Trulia Hindsight will be featured on the exhibition website. I've often dreamed of having a project featured in the MoMA; having four in one show is frankly a bit overwhelming.
For the exhibit, we've re-factored the project so that it works in a gallery setting—we didn't want to just put the website up on the wall and walk away. This is somewhat new territory for us, as almost all of our work is done from start to finish on the web, but I'm excited to see the studio growing in new directions (this is the whole point, right?). Over time, we're changing the piece's variables: taxi speed, trail length and dot size all grow and shrinking in a continously varying series of Brian Eno-type oscillations, so the piece is never quite the same from frame to frame and changes quite a bit when you look at it. A small screenshot:
Shawn has been heading up the project and is heading to New York tomorrow for the install, and we're very glad to have had Gabriel Dunne designing and developing the installation with us.
We’re happy to announce that Oakland Crimespotting is back, thanks to the generous help of Oakland’s City Information Technology Department. After three months without access to report data, we’ve been granted a reliable, regularly-updated source of crime report information. This is great news: it means that the website is back up and running with current information, e-mail alerts and RSS feeds work again, and we at Stamen Design can explore new ways of presenting and publishing this important information.
We are also interested in what additions to the site you would find useful or interesting. So far, we’ve had a number of suggestions that we’re actively looking into: spreadsheet-friendly downloads, details on individual police beats, a search function, and more than one month’s worth of data. If you have any thoughts on these or other ideas, send us a mail at info@crimespotting.org.
Our return would not have been possible without the help of a few key people. Ahsan Baig, Ken Gordon, and Bob Glaze at Oakland City IT built and published a source of information for us. Ted Shelton, Charles Waltner, and others helped us navigate the difficult waters of City Hall communications. Jason Schultz, Ryan Wong, Karla Ruiz, and Jeremy Brown at U.C. Berkeley Law School helped us understand how to best approach city governments for information. Kathleen Kirkwood and Pete Wevurski at The Oakland Tribune helped us understand the journalistic context of the project. Dan O'Neil and Adrian Holovaty at EveryBlock.com were a valuable sounding boards for ideas.
As for me, I'm delighted to see it back online, and especially pleased that the City has given us access to the data. In particular, this notion that cities have an obligation to provide access to data about themselves over the internet is one that I think (and hope) we're going to see catching on more and more, and it's great that Oakland has decided to take a progressive stance on this issue. If you're reading this, and you're a city with a need to learn more about your data and how it flows, do give us a call, won't you?
