Category Archives: Algorithmic Literacy

Parallel Edges in pgRouting

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Elijah Meeks

If, like me, you neglected to check and see if pgRouting (the pathfinding library for PostGIS) handles parallel edges in its default shortest path query, then you’ve likely found out that it doesn’t. You can tell that something is wrong … Continue reading →

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Models as Product, Process and Publication

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Elijah Meeks

In building a transportation network for the Roman Empire and integrating it into a model of movement in the Roman Empire, I’ve found that the shift from creating, annotating and analyzing archives to modeling systems can have a profound impact … Continue reading →

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, New Literature, Peer Review, Spatial Humanities | Comments Off

Infoviz and New Literacies

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Elijah Meeks

Melissa Terras’ recent visual summary of the Digital Humanities has brought attention to the growing vibrancy (and budgets) of the DH community.  It also feeds the cycle of debate about the efficacy, role and usefulness of visual display of information, … Continue reading →

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Visualization | 2 Comments

Why I Stopped Coding in Flash and Learned to Love the Bomb

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Elijah Meeks

I thought Steve Jobs was dead wrong when he condemned Flash back in April of 2010.  The first interesting code I wrote was in Actionscript 3, which I found efficient and remarkably easy to use.  Where JavaScript maps and information … Continue reading →

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Geographic Networks: Getting Started with pgRouting in PostGIS

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Elijah Meeks

I’ve been working a lot with pgRouting in PostGIS lately.  While the work I was doing with geographic networks originally used general purpose network analysis tools like Gephi, I’ve moved the entire Roman transportation network into a PostGIS2 database to … Continue reading →

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Spatial Humanities | 2 Comments

TV Tropes Pt. 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Elijah Meeks

Part 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet Part 2: Trope (but not Troper) Communities Example of Thematic Relationships While it’s one thing to use network visualization to display these structures, and use analytical tools like community detection to make … Continue reading →

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HASTAC V: The Search for More Digital Humanities

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Elijah Meeks

I’m here at the HASTAC conference at the beautiful and only slightly snowy University of Michigan, where Dan Atkins has explained how cyberinfrastructure works from the e-science perspective.  He notes that the NSF can’t fund “humanist” endeavors, but is amenable … Continue reading →

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Google Networks

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Elijah Meeks

Google just announced Ripples,which allows Google+ users to visualize the spread of information across the network.  Scott Weingart gets into some of the details here and references my G+ post on the matter, where I make two claims: 1)  G+ … Continue reading →

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Everything is a Graph and Drawing It as Such is Always the Best Thing to Do

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Elijah Meeks

Well, maybe that’s going a little too far, but Sébastien Heymann has written an excellent response to the Ben Fry quote brought to the fore by Dan Brickley’s recent exploration of literary networks. Ben Fry’s quote in full goes like … Continue reading →

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Hacking Networks in the Humanities

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Elijah Meeks

Hacking, it seems, is in the air. Dan Cohen has announced the edited version of Hacking the Academy, here at Stanford we’ve finished up with our Humanities Hackerspace experiment, and another Bay Area THATCamp (where I’ll be officially giving a … Continue reading →

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Big Data, Graph Data Model, HGIS, Social Media Literacy, Spatial Humanities, Tools, Visualization | Comments Off