Tag Archives: metadata

An Ode to the Underappreciated Spreadsheet | HBR #spreadsheets #Excel #productivity #organization #metadata #data

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Spreadsheets are indispensable tools to us data geeks so I always keep an eye out for new ideas and tips in managing data using spreadsheets. I use many of the features and functions listed in the article and even inspired by a few I never thought of before! In the Related links below the first link is one of the most popular posts on infophile. 

Spreadsheets get a raw deal. We are so dependent on tools like Excel and Google Sheets for managing budgets and P&Ls that it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing spreadsheets only as applications for managing money, or at the very least, for working with numbers.

But the structure and features of spreadsheets make them so useful for a wider range of purposes, from project planning to writing. Breaking information or text into cells helps you break your work into bite-size chunks so you can find different ways of structuring it. The ability to sort and filter cells makes it easy to find, categorize, or reorganize lists or content. And yes, it’s nice to be able to do quick calculations when you are working with numbers. READ MORE: An Ode to the Underappreciated Spreadsheet | HBR

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Google’s AI is getting really good at captioning photos | engadget #AI #images #metadata #classification

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Photo: engadget

It has open-sourced an algorithm that describes images with 94 percent accuracy… READ MORE: Google’s AI is getting really good at captioning photos | Engadget

Crowdsourced Metadata Games: A Primer | Information Space

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The challenge: You have two minutes to educate a Stupid Robot by describing the picture below as precisely as possible. The catch: you can only list one word of any given length from 4-10 letters, and the robot will reject words it already knows. Therefore, you must be accurate, creative, and specific all at once.

An image from the British Library’s collections on http://www.metadatagames.org

If, like me, you found this challenge oddly entertaining, you might enjoy Metadata Games, a set of interactive tagging games designed to help libraries and museums crowdsource useful metadata for their collections.

READ MORE: Crowdsourced Metadata Games: A Primer | Information Space

100 Million Flickr Images for Download | Center for Data Innovation

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Yahoo has released a massive data set of Flickr images and videos that are free to share under their copyright licenses. Yahoo believes the data set, which comprises 99.3 million images and 0.7 million videos, is one of the largest public multimedia data sets ever released. The data set, which promises to be a boon to computer vision researchers, contains metadata including title, description, camera type, and tags. About 49 million of the images are also geotagged. Yahoo is collaborating with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to provide compute resources through the lab’s supercomputer to help researchers analyze the data.

via 100 Million Flickr Images for Download | Center for Data Innovation

How To Turn Your Data Into Beautiful 3-D Maps | Co.Exist

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Even when it’s useful, data is often ugly. And without design experience, it’s difficult to make it visually appealing. Enter DataAppeal. For the past year, the data visualization company has showcased a web platform that makes it easy for anyone to upload location-based data files and turn them into beautiful, visually unique 3-D animated maps on a digital globe.

How To Turn Your Data Into Beautiful 3-D Maps | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

via How To Turn Your Data Into Beautiful 3-D Maps | Co.Exist | ideas + impact.

DataAppeal has a free basic account with limited features and some restrictions, which allows 15 dataset uploads per year.

Take A Graphic Stroll Through Your Own Personal Meta Data | Co.Exist

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With the recent reveal that the NSA has been monitoring Americans’ email “meta-data,” the term has suddenly transformed from an obscure, techy vocabulary word into something on the tip of the average cable-news watcher’s tongue. Email meta-data is, of course, information about an email (like who sent it and when it was sent) as opposed to the content of the email itself. But if it isn’t clear what that means exactly, a recent visualization project by researchers at the MIT Media Lab called Immersion provides “a people-centric view of your email life” by providing an interactive tool to dive into your own meta-data.

via Take A Graphic Stroll Through Your Own Personal Meta Data | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation.

immersion: a people-centric view of your email life. You will need to login via a Gmail account. You can also check out the demo.

Immersion will only display interactions between your personal contacts in a visualization map. It will not actually display more specific metadata than this.

immersion

These Amazing Twitter Metadata Visualizations Will Blow Your Mind | Fast Company

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Metadata in twitter posts lets readers in on your geographic location, the language you speak, the phone you use, and more. They’re also a mapmaker’s best friend.

Quotable: “A second visualization shows language use on Twitter. Metadata from Twitter messages also tells the language the tweet was sent in. In the United Kingdom, most tweets are in English…except in London, where a cacophony of foreign-language tweets dominate the visualization.”

Languages on Twitter

via These Amazing Twitter Metadata Visualizations Will Blow Your Mind | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

A Guardian Guide to Your Metadata | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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A Guardian Guide to Your Metadata | Technology | guardian.co.uk

The guide explores some of the metadata collected through activities you do every day with services including email, phone, camera, Facebook, Twitter, Google Search and web browsers.

A core skill for librarians is learning about metadata. Our reference and research abilities are inherently dependent upon the metadata linked to the materials we are searching for and retrieving. Now we can use these skills to assist our users and patrons in learning about their own personal metadata if they want to educate themselves or have privacy concerns.

Pinterest adds more data to your boards with rich pins | Engadget

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Pinterest is already an absurdly popular way to save stuff from around the web, be it shoes you love, accessories for your bridesmaids or decorations for your man cave. One thing the social-bookmarking service has been missing, however, is context. Now it’s offering a way for companies to deliver more info, through metadata attached to particular types of pages. Rich pins, as they’re being called, can automatically attach price and availability to a product, or ingredient lists to recipes via Pinterest adds more data to your boards with rich pins | Engadget.

Pinterest

Digital Public Library Of America (DPLA) Launches To Public | Mashable

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“After two and a half years of planning, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the U.S.’s first public online-only library, opened its doors today — or at least was made publicly available on the Internet.

The DPLA is a free, open-source resource that makes a number of digital collections and archives across the country available in one place. It launched as a series of partnerships with the Smithsonian, the National Archives, New York Public Library, the University of Virginia, Harvard, Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, Mountain West Digital Library and others. All of the text, photos, videos and audio contained in the DPLA can be searched, or browsed by place or time on the DPLA website” via Digital Public Library Of America (DPLA) Launches To Public | Mashable.

DPLA

Vision of the DPLA Website:

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historic records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials, but these digital collections often exist in silos. The DPLA  brings these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage.

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What is the DPLA? by John Palfrey | The Digital Shift

Quotable: “There are two key points about what the DPLA “is,” at least as of April 2013. First, the DPLA will be what we, the people, decide to make of it, as a shared, public-spirited resource. Second, the DPLA is the community of people who have devoted themselves (ourselves, in fact) to pursuing an ambitious, public-spirited vision of what the future might hold. On day one, we will present a radically open platform that will make a lot of exciting material available more broadly, as well as a lot of code and services with which technologists can do interesting things.”