I’ve been to well over 30 cities now, and have virtually no record of my experiences of them. I’m bad at taking photographs, and only slightly better at keeping a sketchbook. Ideally, I should have researched on the cities beforehand, and made studies of the different urban fabrics and my experiences of them when I visited.

Of course, there was always the problem of not quite knowing how to go about it. And there was the bigger problem of feeling that my personal experience of a place was not valid enough to make up an account by any means sufficiently adequate. It’s a form of procastination and laziness in disguse as the desire for the “full picture”. All facts must be known before one is to take action.

I admire (smart) people that just do it anyway, with whatever they know, and learn while doing it. The world is built on these people. You talk to them, and they have vision and passion, and they make you want to do the thing they are doing.

I was looking at this video: Data Flow

Cute French accents aside, they mention how text and data-vis should go together to weave a narrative of the world around us. I wondered what it would be like of some of the best novels ever written had such data-vis in them. Normally in SF/Fantasy novels, you have maps and things in them. But what if novels had more information to put in more into the context of the time it was written, or written about. How would a person go about turning a novel into something that was collection of visual data and text.

Vis-data is interesting in itself. You could spend a good amount of itme looking at one of the better maps on Visual Complexity. I bet you could weave a story of an entire household with visual data and some text. Wouldn’t that be fun?

It’s the holidays and I get to do the projects that I want to do. Yay! Not the shit school makes me (boo!)