I’ve been laboring away on the conceptual framework for a project that would gather and process computer use vectors like keyboard and mouse clicks, hard drive accesses, memory calls, and application openings and closings to produce music. I’ve been stymied by the technical side of things, specifically, how to. This morning I ran across the very cool SourceForge project SuperCollider, which looks like it can do anything I want it to in terms of capturing actions and running it through a synthesizer. Shortly after finding SuperCollider I ran across a new collection of pieces created with it, each one composed with only 140 characters of code (a la Twitter). I have hope.

Now that I’m out from under the delightful onus of 50,000 words in a month, I’ve had an opportunity to let my mind wander a bit. And, despite the fact that there is enough work with Pinyon to banish sleep where I to let it, I can’t be all about the future all the time. The past is important for a futurist, and I’ve never regretted all those years and hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent exploring the life and times of those long dead.

This morning, BoingBoing had a couple of interesting visuals that made me once again appreciate the importance of the past in contextualizing the present. The first was a map of malarial infection across the US in 1870. We think of epidemiologic topographies as modern inventions, bringing together the glories of GPS, digital cartography, and transnational health authorities, yet public health has been a central concern of governments for thousands of years. I was struck by how modern – in terms of presentation – this map appeared.

The other interesting thing was a link to a collection of old photographs of people segregated by gender. These sorts of photographic studies I always find fascinating because of their intrinsic voyeuristic capacity – an opportunity to see into a world long gone – and because we’re wired to find interesting similarities and difference when looking at a group of people. In the first photo, I was struck as I always am, with the mantle of maturity that many newspaper boys (and by extension all the kids that went to work early) accepted and nurtured. In the second, I was intrigued both by the active poses and how our ideas of female beauty change, and don’t.

I’ve always been fascinated – both in my own work, and that of others – with the evolution of thinking that occurs over the course of a long project. Throw in editors, and nowadays commentators, collaborators, and critics of various and sundry stripes and thing get increasingly complex, frequently frustrating, but also terribly interesting.  A splendid example of the first sort of evolution is embodied – perfectly appropriately – in a stunning bit of textual postprocessing and visualization by Ben Fry. Working from the text collected and managed at The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, Fry has created an interactive map of the evolution of the Origin of Species.  Go spend some time with it.

Ben Fry's visualization of the OoS.