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Mashing Up Suggestions
In The New York Times, IBM scientists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have some fun with search engine auto-suggestions. Type in even a single word and you receive “a list of suggested,...
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Easy = True
An interesting article on “cognitive fluency” offers this great (ironic) infographic: Reporter Drake Bennett leads with the fact that “shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed...
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The Asynchronous Barista
Say you’re a software engineer trying to explain asynchronous processing to people with a general interest in software. You might use Starbucks as an example. Over to you, Gregor Hohpe: Starbucks, like...
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Place as Idea
For New England readers of Information Design Watch, the Worcester Art Museum has a new exhibit opening on October 9, 2010: Place as Idea. David Maisel, Terminal Mirage #215-9-4, 2003, Chromogenic...
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Demotic Internet
I’ve been reading Jacques Barzun’s magisterial history of western culture, From Dawn to Decadence. His final chapter on the late 20th century is titled “Demotic Life and Times,” “demotic” being a word...
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Want to See My Etchings? Visualizing “Language as a Window into Human Nature”
RSA Animate has produced another wonderful visualization, this time animating a lecture by Steven Pinker deconstructing the manner in which language can be used to create meaning. The piece, which runs...
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Let’s Go British
United States’ grammarians place commas and periods inside quote marks. The British style is to place them outside. The British have it right. According to Ben Yagoda at Slate, the practice is...
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Twitter vs. the Academy
For some reason I was looking for examples of 19th century correspondent abbreviations. A search for “yr obt svt” called up an entertaining essay by Len Cassamas titled, fittingly, “Yr Obt Svt”. This...
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The Life of &
The ampersand’s job is to let type designers cut loose. It’s supposed to stand out, you see. Jacob Gube offers a splendid appreciation of this splendid character covering history, styling, encoding,...
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Metadata in Action
Doing a comparative analysis of search functionality, I came across an interesting interactive diagram at the National Archives of Australia. Using simple rollovers the diagram explains the metadata...
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