at the end of this month i will bid farewell to usc’s norris medical library to take a position at loyola marymount university (lmu) as the von der ahe library‘s serials & electronic resources librarian, a new post for their library. stay tuned to this blog for continuing stories about electronic journal usage statistics, monkey comic strips, and other commentary on organization, data management, and monkeys/bananas.
(the lmu mascot is iggy the lion)
i’m working on an analysis of aahsl‘s annual statistics and having a rough time. the stats are messy and seem inconsistent, and i’m new to the statistical program, sas. i wish i had a stats signal, like the beam that was used to call batman when there was a crisis. i could shine it and a stats consultant would leap through my window, ready to offer helpful suggestions and clever shortcuts. the signal might look like this:
a creative, beautiful friend from high school died recently and i’ve been slowly processing all that goes with something like that. brian helped me survive high school chemistry, danced to “rock lobster” on stage with me after dramas and musical performances, and encouraged me through an awful sculpture phase in my art career. his own path led him to a musical profession and i greatly admired his strength to pursue such an uncertain lifestyle. i didn’t understand the fragility that was under that surface.
and then along comes today, international peace day, to remind me that we are all fragile and fleeting. be good to each other out there.
the many social networks i belong to are having a field day with today’s “talk like a pirate day.” enjoy this day for yourself by translating your own communications into pirate-speak. my awesome staff member, nicole, pointed me to this translating service: http://www.syddware.com/cgi-bin/pirate.pl.
here’s the organization monkey’s web page, translated into ‘pirate’:
flickr now allows you to embed a slideshow of your images on a website or blog. find a set of images you like, click on ‘slideshow’, and then when the show starts, hover your mouse in the upper right hand of the screen and click on ‘share’. you can choose to paste a link on your site that takes the viewer back to the flickr site to play the slideshow or you can paste some code to have the slideshow play right on your web page. i should note that you can’t share others’ images this way, just your own, and you need to be logged in to your flickr account to see the share code.
here’s a slideshow of a few of my images:
no doubt you’ve seen pictures of the presidential candidates’ speeches lately, laid out attractively in word clumps. these text ‘clouds’ aren’t new, but this particular visualization technique has really caught on lately, especially with the free tool, wordle. here’s an example of barack obama’s acceptance speech, wordle-style:
what’s nice about the tool is that when you see data like this presented visually, you think about it differently than if you were just reading a transcript of the speech. the creator of wordle, many eyes, has other visualization tools for you to play around with at their site. you may use existing data or upload your own (if you upload your own data, please read the terms of service carefully).
here’s a nice visualization of u.s. active physicians, by state.
