Halfway through

I originally planned to be doing an interim presentation of what I've done so far, but I've accomplished far less than what I would have wanted. For one thing, I haven't been able to live up to my promise to work 2-7 pm every Wednesday and Thursday at Green Papaya on visualization stuff. So far it has just been convenient for me to work at home or in my office. Plus I have a backlog of stuff from my day job to do. I still need to finish marking all the papers and giving students their grades, plus I need to develop large sections of a course on designing and assessing educational multimedia by this Saturday! Tomorrow, I have a workshop to conduct, plus my lola's birthday to attend, then dinner out. Friday I have dinner with fellow faculty, then straight to Laguna to work with Raul and Arjan on our research on Web 2.0 and everyday life in the Philippines.

I'm also getting increasingly worried by the credit crunch. When I really started to hear what analysts are saying about how things are going to look "next year", I finally clued in to what is happening. Even if the markets stabilize themselves soon, effects are going to spread like a ripple (or, perhaps more accurately, like a tidal wave) forward through time and cartographic space. Actually, it would be a good idea to take all the data related to market fluctuations and turn it into a visualization. I wish I knew more about who trades with whom... or what kind of economic or trade connections would be relevant to following the fluctuations of the market.

Anyway, tonight I have to make a couple of decisions. How much do I still want to pursue Antipode? I need to double check with Donna whether she has data related to the kind of audience we can pull into Green Papaya.

My residency has been very quiet and very low impact. For me, this is certainly a Good Thing. I feel like I can work on some important issues through. Blogging on this residency has been very useful. I can only hope that Peewee and Donna, who run Green Papaya, haven't been alarmed with how uneventful the past few weeks have been; they seem to have been under a great deal of stress lately.

But this is just a lot of fretting. Must move on. :)

Ok, tonight, I will flesh out the audience specs for Antipode a bit more. I'll continue where I left off last week learning about the Google Map API. I'll narrow the scope of my literature review. I'll read one visualization paper and make notes. And then I'll call it quits.

I was looking for tools I could use to indicate where my Facebook friends were on a map (to show the folks at iTrixx(. No luck yet, but I did come across this neat tool for visualizing your FB network.

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