Author Archives: Elijah Meeks

Pragmatism, Practicality, and the Anti-Sublime

Imagine an interactive JavaScript globe. It could take many forms. This one is built in D3, based off Mike Bostock’s excellent example and, like most interesting JavaScript visualization, runs smoothly in Chrome and Safari and poorly in Firefox (I haven’t … Continue reading

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Visualization | Comments Off

Some of My Information is Beautiful!

I submitted six pieces to the Information is Beautiful Awards, which is a contest for data visualization and information graphics. Of those six, I’m proud to be able to say that three of my pieces are in just-announced Long List … Continue reading

Posted in Visualization | Comments Off

A Map to Nowhere

The mayor of Salt Lake City recently took issue with his city being described as significantly smaller and less connected than London. There are many ways to gauge importance from a social and cultural sense, such as calculating the centrality … Continue reading

Posted in Amusing Historical Map Features, Natural Law, Spatial Humanities, Visualization | 2 Comments

An Unsatisfying Intro to D3.js

Last week I had the opportunity to give a short introduction to the JavaScript information visualization library D3. The intro, which took place at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) here at Stanford, was directed at an extremely … Continue reading

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, D3, Visualization | Comments Off

Humanities CMS

It’s a good time to be humanities scholar in need of a complex content management system. While WordPress in all its convenience and glory will always be there for the writer who simply wants to write and publish digitally, there … Continue reading

Posted in Drupal, Spatial Humanities, Tools | 1 Comment

How the UVA Crisis Can Help Us Break Out of the Upgrade Path

This year’s eyeo festival focused not on beautiful information, or on amazing new visualization libraries, or data transformation techniques, but rather, as Megan Miller put it, on failure and slow data. That’s horrible, isn’t it? It’s wrong, or at least … Continue reading

Posted in Natural Law | Comments Off

Introducing ORBIS|via

The following also appears in the Applying page of ORBIS. ORBIS|via: A Situated Perspective of a Transportation Network Based on Computer Gaming Principles ORBIS|via can bee seen at orbis.stanford.edu/via/ The initial response to the release of ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Scholarly Work, ORBIS, Spatial Humanities | 2 Comments

Population Intensification, Agricultural Intensification, Ecological Degradation, the Game

Looking back over some old notes of mine, I was reminded that I made this game in Flash three years ago: You control a small early historical site surrounded by virgin woodland. The forest provides lumber, but if you burn … Continue reading

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Digital Scholarly Work, Gaming, New Aesthetic, Pedagogy | Comments Off

CC-BY for Icons?!?!

I just submitted a few nouns to the Noun Project, which is the right thing to do considering I’m using a few of their nouns in a new project. When you submit your icons to NP, you have two options: … Continue reading

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Natural Law, Visualization | Comments Off

Catastrophic Success

There have been a few times over the last two weeks when I thought traffic to ORBIS was finally leveling off. The novelty factor of the work is high–there are very few Imperial Roman Mapquests, or Google Maps for Rome, … Continue reading

Posted in ORBIS | Comments Off