More debate text analysis

I was reading old stuff in Bloglines, and ran across Cameron's toys for looking at the debate transcripts.

Purple proportional map!

Thanks to a pointer from danah: purple proportional map.

Still catching up after Chicago...

I had a fun trip to CSCW in Chicago, especially since I snuck in some time to go on an awesome architecture tour and see jazz.

My talk apparently went well (thanks danah!) although a mid-talk crash led me to forget to show off the topic clustering and similarity coloring that constituted the text analytics. We also got some good questions about the possibility of shared read wear and user profiling.

I'm still sorting through my notes on what I saw and reading through papers. There wasn't anything that really blew me out of the water, although the session on backchannels was interesting and exhausting (I like the idea of augmented classrooms), Barry Wellman was entertaining, and the brief discussion of IDiag was intriguing. The idea of Wikilens was also interesting, and the sessions on software develoment, cultural issues in face-to-face collaboration, and organizational issues rang true. Cliff explained how e2 was supposed to work to me (and gave me some explanations of Slashdot's moderation system). He also pointed me to Susan Herring's work comparing e2 to wikipedia.

Some interesting ways of organizing things: McGrath on ROI, Quentin Jones on wireless. Good explanations of acquiring common ground in different environments. Cool demo of CoWord.

Frankly, commiseration over the election really impeded discussions about collaboration. Larry Lessig, in an awesome-if-generic closing plenary fused the two with his mention of opt-in communities, but didn't really offer any solutions. He did repeatedly mention the book republic.com. Maybe I should read it.

Can't stop thinking about the stupid election

We've seen the proprtional maps and the purple maps, but where are the purple proprtional maps?

Did Kerry really win?

An embarassing day to be an American

It's a sad, sad day when a country can re-elect a fear-exploiting, liberty-squelching, fact-ignoring, world-angering President like Bush. I mean, seriously, if you want to live in a religious state, go start one in the Middle East. And I sure don't feel safer.

(As an aside, how absurd is it that people have to wait hours to vote? That's equivalent to disenfranchising whole portions of the population. Internet voting is so clearly the wave of the future...)

Visual design and the campaigns

Every time I see footage of rallies, I'm shocked that Bush (and, to a lesser extent, Kerry) can use such ugly, almost farcical fonts for their signs. They project power in a 1984, Starship Troopers kind of way. I was trying to see if anybody was analyzing this on the web, but didn't have much luck. The best I could do was a blog about social design which had a recent post about a Times article comparing the two campaigns' logos and a post about this amusing painting. I also found the Design Observer blog, which has some interesting stuff.