I'm taking a graduate computer science course on information visualization. It's going to be an incredible experience, exploring how to make sense of data sets and use spatial/symbolic/textural/other means to represent various aspects of the data.
A huge part of the course is going to be keeping a daily "visual journal" of things we see, as they relate to information and visualization and design. Sounds something like a photoblog. So, I volunteered to set up a class blog for us all to post stuff together, to see what happens. Of course, I'm using UCalgaryBlogs. WordPress is pretty good for this kind of thing. I'm using the Baskerville theme because it's nicely visual - almost pinterest-y. And, a few plugins:
- Blog Members Directory Shortcode - for the "Infovis Members" page
- Easy Add Thumbnail - to automatically add featured images from the first image of a post
- Hide Featured Image - ironically, to hide that auto-set featured image on the post page so it's not duplicated.
- Simple Import Users - to easily add people as Authors on the site by their email address
- Widgets on Pages - to add the Calendar widget to a page. Not sure how that'll work with multi-month displays of data…
And here's the current site. The header image is cropped from a photo I took at the Canada Music Centre.
