After several rounds of rejection, Mobile Logger has been accepted and is available on the App Store! Feel free to try it out; hopefully some folks will find it useful. The source code for the application has been released under the GPL and is available on github.

I’m still actively recruiting participants for my ongoing thesis project, which involves visualizing cyclists in New York City. If you’d like your riding to become incorporated in some pretty pictures to be presented in May, then by all means start logging (and thank you in advance)!

Be warned, it’s a battery hog. Feel free to let me know if it gives you any trouble.

Our assignment last week was to use Foursquare to log our daily travels. This week, we were asked to use a classmate’s Foursquare check-in history as the source of our visualizations. I was given Bryan Lence’s data and set off to see what was there.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself the R “environment for statistical computing and graphics“. It’s an open source project and has a doubly steep learning curve (for me, at least) of an unfamiliar syntax and medium (statistics). I can see it’s power for visualizations, however, when used to reveal interesting associations which can be further refined in other graphics software (in this case, Illustrator).

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We’re using Foursquare as a data logger for one of our assignments in the Telling Stories with Sensors, Data and Humans class at ITP. As an aid to begin understanding the relationships between venues for our tracks, it’s helpful to munge the KML into CSV so it can be plotted and played with in a spreadsheet, Illustrator, R, Processing or whatever…

Below is a short python script to parse a Foursquare KML file into a simple CSV file. It outputs the check-in name, description, timestamp and location (as lat, lon). The Foursquare KML feed is available at the Feeds page on their site. (more…)