MIT says that the objective of these visualizations was to determine how a city performs during a special event or a sudden emergency.

One of the findings of this data is that the Inauguration was a multi-day event for many - there were marked increases in mobile phone activity on the Sunday preceding the Tuesday inauguration and mobile phone activity only returned to normal levels on the Thursday following the event.

The following version of The City features an animated map of the United States:

The World visualization shows phone data from international visitors who were present at President Obama's inaugeration. There were people from 138 countries, over half of all the countries in the world. The top countries represented were Canada, Great Britain, France, and Puerto Rico. Those countries all had a fivefold increase in call activity compared with a normal day. In the U.S., the top calling states were also the country's most populous: California, Florida, New York, and Texas.

How Can This Data Be Used?

These are all pretty 'info porn' graphics but, as we've questioned before with MIT SENSEable City Lab, what actual use are these visualizations?

Up till now, MIT claims, it has been "difficult to monitor urban dynamics in real time." Traditional methods have been head counts, surveys, aerial inspection, and satellite image analysis, but they are "costly and slow to produce quantitative results." The key to the approach demonstrated above is "to process existing information in real time from the telecommunications infrastructure."

Real-time: that's a term we're hearing an awful lot of this year. In the case of MIT SENSEable City Lab, real-time data is largely obtained via mobile phone networks - which MIT regards as "a nervous system for the city" and which can therefore provide useful information and services to people.

MIT says that the real-time feedback loop from mobile phone data "has the potential to influence many urban functions and can help local authorities, service providers, businesses, and citizens themselves to improve the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the places they inhabit."

After installing a small Firefox plugin, Facette adds two icons to your status bar - one for bookmarking new pages and one for accessing your bookmarks. The Facette site itself presents both the standard, tag-based view of your bookmarks and Facette's own, more structured data. Because Facette sits on top of Delicious, all your Facette bookmarks are automatically also available on your default Delicious page. Indeed, Facette works by creating a number of new tags in your Delicious library.

Being a research project, Facette is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it looks like a great way to keep your Delicious library more organized - especially when you are using Delicious to keep track of a larger research project. If you decide to use Facette, the developers also request that you sign up for a user study on the homepage, though this is completely optional.

To access the site, all you need is a mobile device, a Web browser, and WiFi, and the MIT Mobile Web will automatically detect your device type and deliver content optimized for it.

According to Andrew Yu (Mobile Devices Platform Project Manager) at MIT IS&T, the technology behind the project includes WURFL and Python, XHTML and CSS, PHP, MySQL, SOAP and RSS.

The next step, according to Yu is to explore personalization and customization in a secure manner: "For instance, it would be great if students using mobile devices can securely check their grades or the balance of their MIT TechCash account and make simple transactions instead of having to pull out their laptop. Our team is brainstorming the next set of modules and arranging meetings with various departments at MIT. We expect to include content from MIT News, Campus Dining, TechTV, MIT World, and other areas in coming months."

If you're interested in finding out more, take a look at these two presentations:

MIT's Vision for Mobility[PDF]

Developing the MIT Mobile Web[PDF]

"Blogging has already changed how I work as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences -- and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences," said Wardrip-Fruin. A community of respected peers has sprung up around Grand Text Auto, according to Wardrip-Fruin, one that he hopes to tap into for comments on his latest book. "This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wardrip-Fruin is using an adapted version of CommentPress, which is a plugin that lets users comment individually on each paragraph of a blog post, and will be posting his book one chapter at a time on his blog. The first chapter, "Media Machines," is already up.

While Wardrip-Fruin has high hopes had the blog review will yield more fruitful feedback than a traditional peer review, not everyone is so certain. His editor Doug Sery, while curious to see what sort of comments blog review yields, isn't willing to bet the bank on it. "I don't know how this general peer review is going to help," he told the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Expressive Processing will simultaneously receive a traditional peer review -- a process which involves soliciting anonymous feedback from other professors and authors -- while it gets the open blog review treatment. When both processes are complete, Wardrip-Fruin and Sery will be able to compare the results and see which yielded more helpful comments.

While Sery is probably right that a serious peer review can't be conducted openly on a blog, and for the integrity of the publisher, editor, and author to remain intact, a traditional peer review must be done, blog review does have a place. Comments from blog readers could certainly be helpful in crafting the final product, even if they are too informal to be considered a real peer review. "I am dead certain [blog review] will make the book better," said Wardrip-Fruin.

Wardrip-Fruin isn't the only recent author to seek help in the editorial process from readers. Earlier this month we wrote about Daniel Oran, who is using the Amazon Kindle to beta test his book. While Oran's book has sold well -- reaching as high as #7 on the Kindle sales charts -- and he has so far received 11 reviews on the book's sales page, it is questionable how useful they will be. Most of the reviews are typical to Amazon: short, personal, and not much in the way of analysis of the book itself.

It seems that most reviewers are treating Oran's book as if it were already published -- that is, they want to help other readers decide whether to buy, rather than help Oran decide what to fix. That is likely a result of the method Oran chose to solicit feedback (via Amazon review). Had he encouraged readers to give feedback in a less public way (i.e., via a message board or via email), he may have received more substantive comments -- the type that Wardrip-Fruin is hoping for on his blog.

"The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet, a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words," explains the project's web site. "Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance."

The result is a stunning visual map of the English language. As Angela Gunn points out, it is thus rather ironic that the very first word on the grid is "blind."

Oh, for anyone who was wondering, Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia...