Catching a glimpse over someone’s shoulder as they work is one of my favorite ways to learn. It can be new keyboard-shortcut-fu for Adobe Illustrator, a more graceful way of wrestling a stuck bicycle pedal from the crankarm, or standing by while a friend reinvents an entire speech.

In that vein, Chartsnthings is a blog of how New York Times data visualizations are born in the Graphics Department, maintained by graphics editor @KevinQ. I love seeing the playful evolution of ideas.

Despite the fact that I’ve spent nearly a decade of my work sketching things — often with Sharpie on yellow paper, just like in the photo above — and then translating them to digital form, it hadn’t occurred to me that you might sketch visualizations before coding them. I suppose that’s what comes next, after I get a bit more fluent in R.

Here’s some serious RGB epilepsy coming straight out of R (a different project than the one sketched above):

Now the circles dialed back to a more manageable size:

Quealy says that at this point he added county boundaries to the map. The blaring blues set the graphic back a couple of steps:

And here’s the final product:

[via kottke.org]

Short of Margaret Mead in Samoa, research turns first to the most easily available or accessible data. See: fruit flies and genetics, United Nations transcriptions and machine translation, Wikipedia and online collaborative behavior. Linguists studying modern colloquial language are increasingly turning to the very public, very current Twitter.

Lexicalist is a tool based on this premise, mapping the geographic weight of any given part of contemporary, colloquial language by using Twitter content and geotags. It will be a while or an eternity until I can use this un-self-consciously, but one of my favorite Philadelphia regionalisms is “jawn“. On the Visual Thesaurus blog, Ben Zimmer describes ‘jawn’ as ”a variant of joint, from hiphop slang, originally meaning ‘something good’ but extended to refer to all sorts of people and things”. Like the Boston non-rhotism, it’s often buried in a seemingly innocuous utterance. And it’s the perfect word to mean nothing, and everything, at once.

The addiction used to manifest itself in calling up a tower of books at the local library. Now it’s landing on a Wikipedia page after plowing through an entire oevre, reloading in oft-vain hope that they are not, in fact, dead. That way, I might expect a new book to show up in the fall.

I’ve noticed that in many of my very favorite books, place plays a starring role: the lilt, the fog, the soils, the creatures of a place as full-fledged characters, and a little dash of magical realism besides. Mix tapes were never my forte, but books I can do. Here, then, is a concert of such books:

1. Prelude

Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton

This novella is short like a prelude, and likewise sets the stage for the rest of this list. It takes place in the dark days of the late 1970′s, when thousands of Argentineans disappeared into the general’s prison cells and torture chambers. Yet the reserved text is still hopeful.

2. The California Trio

In America by Susan Sontag

By kicking off this story in Poland, Susan Sontag makes it seem more American than ever. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland’s greatest actress, travel to California to found a “utopian” commune. They confront a West that is still largely empty, on the cusp of modernity. A magnificent story.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

I fell in love with this book because of its descriptions of the sere and expansive American West. Yet it’s experienced by a woman torn between the east — the values imbued from Victorian-era New York upbringing — and west — her fascination with the land around her.

History, love, struggle, blame, pride: Stegner blends these subtly and beautifully in this book. (Thanks Thea for leading me to it!)

West of the West: Imagining California ed. Leonard Michaels, David Reid, Raquel Scherr

This is a fun, beautiful, and delightful collection of stories, essays, remembrances and poems by a diverse and splendid array of writers (all native Californians) including Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Simone de Beauvoir, Amy Tan, M.F.K. Fisher, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal.

3. Adagio

The Winter Sea by Susannah Kearsley

This term literally means “at ease”, and refers to slow and stately tempo. The loveliest adagios, however, use the slow pace to let rich, elegant themes shine — much like The Winter Sea’s beautiful prose and riveting, slow-building storyline set in both modern and historical Scotland.

4. Rondo

Swamplandia by Karen Russell

A rondo refers to music that is fast and vivacious. A novel about about the downfall of an alligator-wrestling amusement park in the Florida swamps? Definitely fits the bill. But it’s really Swamplandia is really the story of 12-year-old (and gator-wrestler-in-training) Ava figuring out how to navigate the world. What a magnificent, creative, warm story.

What are your recommendations? I’ll take anything from a pairing to a tasting menu!

Urban advocate, writer, and Next American City editor Diana Lind spoke with us today about “Disrupting the Status Quo: Opportunities for Sustainability”. She gave us a clear 3-part framework in which to think about the major challenges to urban sustainability, and illustrated them with vivid examples, comparisons, and stories.

Below are my visual notes, and above is a map highlighting park deserts (more than 10 minutes’ walk from a park or recreation center) from Philadelphia’s Green2015: An Action Plan for the First 500 Acres.

In a morning devoid of paperwork and red tape, Tim O’Reilly (former board member and now a sort of fairy godfather to CfA), led us in a discussion about what good open software looks like. The fascinating tension and balance between breadth and depth will, I’m sure, surface repeatedly. Should we invest time into a robust platform, or a quick and discrete feature improvement? Run an analysis to support an important policy citizens won’t see until 2016, or make it painless for any neighborhood to get a block party permit next summer?

I suspect the ideal alternates between the two zoom levels, with one informing the other. What do you think?

A little reading before the first day. Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice by Daniel Lathrop and Lauren Ruma.

Broad similarities highlighted the more quotidian (and, in my book, more delightful) differences. Two of my favorite browsing spots were bookshops in Susannah’s neighborhood. Books are more expensive in Australia (by 27% compared to US), which the Sydney Morning Herald attributes to a variety of reasons including higher printing and shipping costs, the inefficiencies of a smaller market, and Australian publishing being owned by high-overhead, debt-laden multinational conglomerates.

At the same time, perhaps some of the cost is returned to the reader. Both shops held an air of being well and truly curated. And the Potts Point Bookshop — the size of a Manhattan studio apartment — publishes this short but rich guide every season. Here are just a few of its dozen or so pages:

Summer reading guide. November is summer! “…Thank our loyal customers… entice new friends… and of course, we would love to help you in person at the bookshop!”

Short summaries are great for picking gifts or piquing your interest. And yes, that’s $33.00 for a paperback.

This is the propeller hat that everyone received on their first day. We had to wear them to a company-wide happy hour that Friday and introduce ourselves. A couple of months ago, I sent this email:

Hi everyone,

I’m writing to let you know that I am leaving Google at the end of November. The past few years through Ads, Docs, Flu Trends, Maps, and more (not to mention UX team dodgeball and septabike rides) have been an incredible journey, and it’s no easy decision to tear myself away from this community and, dare I say it, family. This is a company that adds extra zeros to any target number, turns outlandish jokes into useful launches, maps the moon, and elevates everything from CSS classnames to tech support to cafeteria lunch into an art form.

But it’s precisely these experiences at Google that have made me impatient with the way the world works, and I’m hungry to bring our spirit to the wider world. I’ll be spending 2012 creating reusable, open-source civic technology as a Code for America fellow.

Thank you all so much. Please don’t be strangers.

— Mosh