After having depredated the MIT libraries on books and papers on data
visualization, I've decided to try to do my homework and see what I learned.
You can find the result here:
http://simile.mit.edu/charts.html
if you have an SVG capable browser, you can also try the SVG version at
http://simile.mit.edu/charts/chart.svg
These charts follow Edward Tufte's principle of maximizing info per
pixel (and thus reducing churtjunk to a minimum), the result is compact
even if it doesn't shine in information density, but I'm pleased with
the results.
The chart is generated using Ploticus (ploticus.sf.net), a really nice
chart-oriented scripting language.
The charts are generated every night, via a cron job that executes a few
python scripts that do the data aggregation against the apache logs and
the ezmlm subscription logs. There is nothing SIMILE specific there, but
the apache logs need to be split by day (I use 'cronolog' for that).
Anyway, find the scripts at
http://simile.mit.edu/repository/stats/
The next thing will be to integrate RSS feeds into that automatically
(now the events are hardcoded into the script, which isn't really sexy).
Enjoy.
[BTW, comments/suggestions appreciated]
--
Stefano Mazzocchi
Research Scientist Digital Libraries Research Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology location: E25-131C
77 Massachusetts Ave telephone: +1 (617) 253-1096
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 email: stefanom at mit . edu
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Received on Tue Feb 15 2005 - 02:08:03 EST
