Procrastination leads to Investigating Current events: Tracking the Flow of the BP Oil Spill

The NYTimes continues to update their fantastic interactive graphic tracking the flow of oil from the Rig explosion in the gulf of Mexico here. Today as i attempted to avoid more mind numbing portfolio review I took some time to time lapse their graphic into one individual image. Corresponding colors relate a list of events from each of the 34 days to the size and shape of the oil plumes movements on that day. Subsequently each week is documented on the bottom axis to show the growth from 5,000,000 barrels leaked on day one to 90,000,000 by day 34*.

* Note that both media outlets and BP have stated that actual oil leaked may be 10 times more than these output estimates.

First Test Prints of Quantitative Appendix

Better late then never…

Unsolicited Entertainment

This took place the other night. A 60′s era Cadillac making its round through the amsterdam canals and providing entertainment for the street corner gatherings. A scene and a crowd gathered but concurrently traffic and life proceed as they can. Yet how do you make your way through the narrow lanes when the person in front of you stands on their vehicle roof to document? Yet no one panicked, no one became upset, all simply smiled and enjoyed the moment. And after a few songs, the caravan proceeded on to another location.

Al Manakh Quantitative Appendix: Visualization 1: A Year of Research

It is out of our hands and soon into yours: Volume’s special issue Al Manakh Gulf Cont’d – 536 pages on the Gulf region from 139 contributors based in over 20 countries will be launched in just under a month, on April 18, both in the Gulf and beyond. Over a year of researching, questioning, commentating, and evaluating topics that have evolved from the Gulf have been collated into this edition, limited only by the size of your postbox.

For many of us, there is no finality in a topic that is eternally evolving, and as the title indicates, continuing. It would be very easy to wipe our hands clean, claim its completeness and move on. But with the excitement of the process and its result still fresh in our memory, we still look for ways to continue the dialogue this journey incited.

The project of Al Manakh collects narratives over the year. And with a year of research comes a year of data. The intention now is to engage an alternative vantage into the making of Al Manakh.

What we present is a series of visualizations – a quantitative appendix to supplement the qualitative publication – in hope that from looking back, and the reader looking forward, we can enhance the conclusions that represent this schism in time of a continuing Gulf.

The forthcoming blog series focuses on the sources, content and relationships that develop through its making: From Process to Production.

For more information or to pre-order your copy visit volumeproject.org

This first post is something I have been developing over the last few months. As a team coordinating from multiple time zones, the most effective way to collect and distribute relevant articles into the pool of collective research was to use the online bookmarking service Delicious as a universal reference location. By the conclusion of research in March 2010, we had over 1200 articles and 143 different tags. This by no means qualifies the entirety of the research but presents a cross-section of materials utilized to the research community. Delicious provides a simple means of collection, but lacks the ability to view the material from an alternative perspective. The Al Manakh Research calendar is the first step in the development of a tool to investigate these relationships, a way to understand the volume of our research database. While still in its infancy of development as a research tool, it prompts insightful questions about both the content and our individual research activity.

Viewbook

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Archis as Guide: Aldo van Eyck Playground Tour 2009

Jonathan Hanahan and Rory Hyde

From Volume #22 The Guide:

In 2002, Volume’s predecessor Archis presented a ‘Psychogeographic Bicycle Tour of Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam Playgrounds’.1 Included were two numbered maps of the location of the playgrounds in 1976 and 2002, a list indicating their current status, and a series of before and after photos showing how they had stood up to the test of time and encroaching urban development.

First designed by the 26 year-old van Eyck in 1947 for the Department of Urban Development, the playgrounds from his hand – and those replicating it – are beautifully simple, inspired by the artistic likes of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Their minimalist forms, such as steel framed climbing domes, circular sand pits and horizontal bars of varying heights quickly spread throughout the city to form a familiar recurring element, and an important part of Amsterdam’s collective childhood memory.

As this issue of Volume presents a comprehensive exploration of the concept of ‘the guide’, we thought we would test their credentials by re-revisiting these playgrounds with the magazine as our guide. Please join us on this journey.

Find the rest of the article here (As Published):

http://issuu.com/jhanahan/docs/v22_hanahanhyde_archisasguide

My Life as an InfoGraphic.

Considering current projects are causing information graphics to take over my entire life at the moment, I decided to make myself into one. Nicolas Felton’s project http://daytum.com/ provides a simple means of input and analysis of daily activities, intake, output, etc. Felton is most notably known for his ‘Annual Reports’ graphics published at the beginning of each year tracking everything he has done over the last year. Following the data input at daytum.com it is incredibly simple to develop numerous types of graphics to display and compare the data. My experiment began this month, based entirely on the curiosity of what I will learn about myself, and how I present myself to the world. First thing I noticed… My caffeine and alcohol consumption average to cancel each other other out. I hope this is just stress and not a pattern ? I guess we will find out. A taste of more interesting analysis to come…..Breakdown of what I listened to yesterday.

Breakfast in the Park.