This semester has been a busy one, and the weeks are getting away from me! There’s a lot to talk about, so I’m going to break it up into a few posts. Here, I’d like to catch up on the first couple of drafts of my soil poster for my research methods class. The point…
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ResearchMethods: Defining narrative and scope
I think it’s time to start narrowing down my narrative flow for the Research Methods project to help reduce the amount of reading and data processing necessary for the project. At this point, the dominant points seem to be: Soil is a complex system, and critically important for both food security and climate change. Soil has…
ResearchMethods: Experimenting with R Markdown
This is a cut-and-paste of a post created in R Markdown for my Research Methods class with Dietmar Offenhuber. It appears that there is no simple way to load an R Markdown file into a WordPress post, so I’m porting it over manually instead. The original post is here. This is a continuation of the…
LEDGrid: Playing with touch
Branden has been working hard in the past few weeks to finish the LED grid assembly. All of the boards are together now, and things are (mostly) working. Here’s a quick video of the board in action, and connected to Processing on the laptop. (Sorry for the whiny cat in the background. Yes, she is…
ResearchMethods: Exploration of land use data
My research methods class is doing a semester-long project on the origins and implications of an object of our choosing. I decided to work with soil, as I wrote about before. After doing the “object autopsy” from my previous post, I went to the scientific literature and started looking deeper into what goes into making healthy soils, and…
IDStudio2: Google Forms data
We’ve started moving beyond simple code sketches in my IDStudio II class (with Noah Passel). We all took a “getting to know you” survey on the first day of class, using Google Forms. This week, our assignment was to take that data and visualize it using d3. Noah provided all of the code to interface…
VizTech2: Beautiful Particles
I mentioned in my last post about VizTech2 (my P5.js course, with Pedro Cruz) that we had learned how to make a fireworks display using particle systems. At first, the sketch made fireworks when you clicked with the mouse. Then, we taught it to generate new fireworks by implementing a “lifetime” for each particle. If too…
DesignTheory: Network visualization 2
I am continuing to think about what it would take to create a robust visualization method for networked systems. If you want the visualization to be a way of teaching, I don’t think it’s enough to simply show nodes and connectors. My thinking on this topic comes largely from my experience teaching. In essence, teaching…
IDStudio, VizTech2: Compositions, and fireworks
I’ve noticed that I tend to forget to post about my programming classes. I think it’s because we’re often doing things that seem pretty basic, or that don’t ever quite feel finished. But it’s still good to record progress, so here are a few things that I’ve been coding over the past couple of weeks….
DesignTheory: Thoughts on entropy
As a scientist, I am used to thinking of entropy as disorder. It is the thing that takes a clear signal and turns it into noise. When entropy is introduced into a system, information decays. This week’s reading for my Design Theory class turned that idea on its head. We read Shannon + Weaver’s Mathematical…