Filter by: Conceptual | Visualization | Design | Illustration | Narrative | Web
2007
Advanced Photon Source
The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is the largest scientific user facility in the U.S., so its website has domestic and international users, and supports a very specialized audience. As Webmaster, my job is to transform a very large, decentralized, and static website into one that is dynamic, accessible, maintainable, and well-designed. Like any site, this is an ongoing and organic process. After cutting the file count in half, (down from over 500,000 pages) in December 2007 I launched a redesign of the home page and the site’s major sections. Since we are not yet using a true web CMS, I built several custom solutions using a combination of Oracle Enterprise Content Management, Ajax (with jQuery+XML) and PHP.
Highlights:
- Interactive Beamlines Map built primarily in jQuery with XML backend and PHP
- Calendar utilizes RSS as storage and hcalendar microformats
- Status page aggregates and resizes images with ImageMagick
2007
Uncovering Discover
Uncovering Discover is a data visualization I was invited to develop for the University of Illinois Library. The goal was to visualize in real-time (or as close as possible) the several thousand daily requests coming in and out of the Library’s Discover system, which is an online full-text article retrieval service based on Ex Libris SFX.
The front end display was built in Processing and is intended to run as a standalone application in a gallery-style environment. The back end utilizes XML feeds generated from the bowels of SFX – many thanks to Sharif Islam for his diligent work creating the feeds, and modifying them based on my frequent whims.
The project is currently on display via a large plasma display at the Grainger Engineering Library at the UIUC campus, and will likely tour some other locations.
Much appreciation to Susan Harum, Lori Mestre, and John Weible for their coordination and support of this project.
2006
Prairie Fire Glass
The Prairie Fire Glass website is one of my personal favorites, since it represents my dad’s glassblowing studio. I designed, developed, and have maintained the site since 2003. The original version ran on a custom Coldfusion/MySQL CMS, but since Coldfusion is seemingly out the door, I migrated the content to Drupal and did a redesign in 2006. The site uses a stripped-down integrated Gallery for all image management purposes.
2006
Saturday Art School
I designed and developed the Saturday Art School website through a grant project for the Art Education program at the University of Illinois School of Art+Design. The goal was to create a dynamic, interactive site that could allow easy contributions and management by students and faculty in the program. Additionally, the site had to support a variety of media, including calendars, photo and video galleries, blogs, and forums.
The solution was a custom, audience-focused design based upon a Drupal backend with several integrated plugins. Administration of the site has shifted to the Art Education program since I left Art+Design in 2006.
2006
⇒ (implies)
The software randomly selects a word from a thesaurus, and obtains one of its synonyms. The search continues for synonyms of those synonyms, and so on, until no more unique synonyms are available. This process continues infinitely.
Sometimes – though not always – a long chain of synonyms produces words that are not similar at all, and are instead odd, hilarious, disturbing, or even antonymous.
Built in Processing and MySQL using the WordNet lexical database. The interface shows the details of the currently-processed chain, and a brief history of recently-processed chains. Online version and “best-of” coming soon.
2005
300-Mile Cube
The largest visible object capable of being rendered with OpenGL in Processing. This cube is 300mi3. (Diptych shows front and back.)
2005
Terror Alert Clock
Each minute, the program counts the frequency of the word “terror” (and variations like “terrorist”) from a live RSS feed from yahoo.com. This count is then directly applied to The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s color-based terror alert system to display a more legitimate — and frequently updated — representation of the “threat level.” Visualizes the past minute, hour, day, and week.
Coming in 2008: more integrated feeds, a live web version, and dashboard widgets.
Download:
Windows | Mac OS X | Platform-free .jar (requires JRE 1.4.2+)
2005
breakingNews
A piece about the negative and aggressive tendencies of news media. Compares live world news feeds from yahoo.com and bbc.co.uk against a database of synonyms of the word “aggression,” then outputs the matches as angry, fighting capsules. More matches return more, and angrier, capsules. Refreshes every minute.
My original intent with this piece was to prove that the U.S. media reported the news in a more aggressive fashion than its European counterparts. This has turned out to be a false presumption.
Download:
Windows | Mac OS X | Platform-free .jar (requires JRE 1.4.2+)
2005
the distance between us
distance = velocity × time
velocity: as fast as the computer can “read”
time: as long as it takes.
The program infinitely reads the words between the entries “me” and “you” in Webster’s dictionary as fast as is computationally possible. Displays the current word and an abstract (but accurate) progress bar.
Download: Windows | Mac OS X | Platform-free .jar (requires JRE 1.4.2+)
2005
School of Art+Design
I was the Web and Network Administrator at the University of Illinois School of Art+Design from 2002-2006. During that time I built a variety of internal web-based applications in support of the School, including several integrated print-accounting tools, a custom network inventory system, a billing and account management application, and a custom CMS for the public Art+Design website. Most work was done with Coldfusion, MySQL and Active Directory/LDAP. From 2005-2006 I helped coordinate the preparatory work for the public site relaunch, and developed a sample redesign (sketch pictured.)
