The Paranoid Agnostic

About Blog Day

I am told that today is Blog Day and that on Blog Day bloggers are supposed to blog about five blogs that they believe their readers will find interesting.

is getting pretty big, and ever since becoming a graduate student in Library and Information Science, I have been mostly adding library/infosci blogs. Thus, I find it strange that when I made this list of “five blogs that I think you should know about” there was just one library blog that made the cut.

Five Interesting Blogs That I Think You Should Know About

CogNews

News about Cognitive Science. This is the slashdot of cognitive science, with infrequent posting but excellent selection of content.

All In The Mind

Podcast from ABC (Australian Radio Station) about psychology. Really interesting 30 minutes podcasts. I highly recommend checking the archives for the recent interview with Daniel Dennet on Evolutionary Psychology and Religion and another recent episode on Stalking.

Junk Charts

I usually don’t like sites that just criticize other people’s work. However Junk Charts is special. It is a thoughtful and very productive criticism of data visualization (i.e. charts and graphs that are misleading or deceptive or just plain bad)

Statistical Graphs and Data Visualization

Despite the title sounding dull, this is a very exciting topic. If you have ever heard of or read Tufte, then you will undoubtedly find this site useful and interesting.

Unit Structures:: Fred Stutzman

Fred Stutzman is a Ph.D. student in Library and Information Science. He is by now becoming famous for his work on the adoption of Facebook by college students. If you search Google Video you will find that he has given a talk at Google about his research on facebook. His site also has some links to MP3 files of recent interviews he gave. His postings about his research are well worth reading.

I have created a Library 2.0 mashup (for TALIS MUTL06 competition) using data from http://visityourlibrary.net, and thealbertalibrary.ab.ca using the Google Maps API. I call this mashup LibraryMapApp. It is a javascript library that makes it easier to search for and display libraries using the google maps API. I have also created a working demostration of LibraryMapApp using data from the websites mentioned above.
The application can be viewed at http://paranoidagnostic.net/map/

This application will allow you to search for libraries of all sorts in Alberta, Canada. The data was geocoded using Google Maps. Unfortunately the data I got form visityourlibrary.net was not that accurate. I have subsequently created a geocoding helper which can be seen at http://paranoidagnostic.net/map/geocode.html. The Geocoder Helper, allows you to search for an address, enter in extra information about the location (name, homepage etc.), and finally you can zoom and get fine positioning of the latitude and longitude.

The data from the geocoder helper has not yet made it into my “Find a Library in Alberta” demonstration. However, there are a team of intreprid librarians working on that right now (thanks Anne!).

The source code for all of this is available under the GPL 2.0 license and can be downloaded from http://paranoidagnostic.net/map/libmapapp.zip

Forgive, the scanty details right now (tired, need sleep). The basic usage of LibraryMapApp is like this:

1. Create an HTML file with three divs: one for a map, one for map details, one for a search box
2. In the head of the script include your Google Map API script with your API key
3. In the head of the script include ablibapp.js
4. Write a function called “load()” that will create a new LibraryMapApp and load data for the libraries you wish to search and display. In my case I just put the all in a javascript file.
5. Library data is just a JSON object with the following properities (at a minimum)

1. id
2. name
3. address
4. phone
5. homepage
6. lat (latitude… the included geocoder helper can help get this)
7. lng (longitude)

This first version needs much improvement. I have data for each library that identifies its type (public, academic, special, government, health etc.) and its “zone” (what region of the province it is from). The next version of LibraryMapApp will allow libraries to be grouped together, each with a different icon color and the ability to search within groups or to search all groups but have them displayed differently (so public libraries might show up with green markers, and academic with blue).

The API also needs to be reworked from the ground up to make it more re-usable. This is a good first step, but it counts more as an exercise than real API.