Lesson Plans: Dr. Seuss Dr. Seuss & WWII: Analyzing Political Cartoons Dr. Seuss is the beloved author of more than 50 children’s books. Mapping America's Changing Political Conversation Researchers used computational techniques to map recurring words and their relation to each other across 224-years of State of the Union remarks. Viewed as a network, the words point to common themes and disruptions in political discourse. (Courtesy of the authors) No historical record may capture the nation’s changing political consciousness better than the president’s State of the Union address, delivered each year except one since 1790.
This 1-minute animation will change your perception of life in the Universe If extraterrestrial life is anything like what we see on Earth, then chances are it's living on Earth-like planets thousands, or even millions, of light-years from our Solar System. Today, astronomers have detected over 1,700 extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, with NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. While it's hard to visualise so many planets, a second-year astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington, Ethan Kruse, has found a way that is both mesmerising and oddly humbling. Check out his animation above, where every circle you see is a planet. (Our Solar System is on the far right.)
Anne Frank and her family were also denied entry as refugees to the U.S. Portrait of Anne Frank at age 12, sitting at her desk at the Montessori school in Amsterdam. (Courtesy Anne Frank House, Amsterdam) Many have noted the historical parallels between the current debate over Syrians seeking refuge in the United States and the plight of European Jews fleeing German-occupied territories on the eve of World War II. Among the many who tried — and failed — to escape Nazi persecution: Otto Frank and his family, which included wife, Edith, and his daughters, Margot and Anne. And while the story of the family's desperate attempts ending in futility may seem remarkable today, it's emblematic of what a number of other Jews fleeing German-occupied territories experienced, American University history professor Richard Breitman wrote in 2007 upon the discovery of documents chronicling the Franks' struggle to get U.S. visas. world
Big-Data Project on 1918 Flu Reflects Key Role of Humanists A deadly virus arrives in America, carried by travelers from abroad. Health officials scramble to contain the threat, imposing quarantines and other strict measures even as they seek to reassure the public. It sounds like the Ebola outbreak of 2014. But this scenario played out almost a hundred years ago, during the Spanish-influenza pandemic of 1918. Now a team of humanists and computer scientists has combined early-20th-century primary sources and 21st-century big-data analysis to better understand how America responded to the viral threat in 1918. It’s a study in the possibilities as well as the pitfalls of interdisciplinary work, and a model-in-progress for how data-driven analysis and close reading can enhance each other.
This is what the entire known Universe looks like in a single image Isn’t it beautiful? This is an illustrated logarithmic scale conception of the observable Universe with the Solar System at the centre. Encircling the Solar System are the inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri star, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, other nearby galaxies, the cosmic web, cosmic microwave radiation, and invisible plasma produced by the Big Bang at the very edges. See below for uncropped and zoomable versions.
Winston Churchill's Their Finest Hour Speech I spoke the other day of the colossal military disaster which occurred when the French High Command failed to withdraw the northern Armies from Belgium at the moment when they knew that the French front was decisively broken at Sedan and on the Meuse. This delay entailed the loss of fifteen or sixteen French divisions and threw out of action for the critical period the whole of the British Expeditionary Force. Our Army and 120,000 French troops were indeed rescued by the British Navy from Dunkirk but only with the loss of their cannon, vehicles and modern equipment. This loss inevitably took some weeks to repair, and in the first two of those weeks the battle in France has been lost. Writing History in the Digital Age » Writing History by the Numbers (Haber) Fall 2011 Writing History by the Numbers: A New Historiographic Approach for the 21st Century? by Peter Haber Since the so-called linguistic turn in the 1980s, the mainstream of Western historiography has focused with a preference to textual and more recently to visual sources (pictorial turn). The favorite methodical approaches to history of recent decades were cultural history, discourse analysis, oral history, and history of mentality. Social history and other quantifying historical approaches were mostly overlooked. But with the new possibilities of digital networks hitherto neglected methods could suddenly awaken new interest in the historical community (and beyond).
Why do we visualize data? Why do we visualize data? Do data visualizations aim to inform audiences effectively? Or do they simply aim to catch people’s eye, providing the just gist of the data? This is a question which has been hotly debated by some of the leading authors in the field of data visualization recently. Data visualization is a spectrum, determined by your data, your objectives and your audience. Whichever visualization style you choose, it should be the most effective one for the purpose at hand.
What Americans thought of Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II The results of the poll illustrated above by the useful Twitter account @HistOpinion were published in the pages of Fortune magazine in July 1938. Fewer than 5 percent of Americans surveyed at the time believed that the United States should raise its immigration quotas or encourage political refugees fleeing fascist states in Europe — the vast majority of whom were Jewish — to voyage across the Atlantic. Two-thirds of the respondents agreed with the proposition that "we should try to keep them out." [Yes, the comparison between Jewish and Syrian refugees matters]
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete "All models are wrong, but some are useful." So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? VisIt About VisIt VisIt is an Open Source, interactive, scalable, visualization, animation and analysis tool. From Unix, Windows or Mac workstations, users can interactively visualize and analyze data ranging in scale from small (<101 core) desktop-sized projects to large (>105 core) leadership-class computing facility simulation campaigns.