Wind Map

The Wind Map, mentioned by Professor Klein during her speech The Long Arc of Visual Display caught my attention. You can check out how the winds move across the United States at http://hint.fm/wind/ . Since the Professor alluded to it very briefly, I decided to find out what the map was for. It turns out, Wind Map is a personal art project of the two leaders of Google’s “Big Picture” visualization team, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas (creators of History Flow from our homework). Although Wind Map was designed for purely artistic reasons, people are trying to use it while studying birds migration tendencies, planning bicycle trips, and speculating on chemicals in the atmosphere (?!). This makes me think of Where’s the Beef piece, mentioned by Professor Klein as well. Digital Humanities does not have to answer questions right away; even if its projects seem unhandy at the moment, they might become very practical in future.

For more on Wind Map, go to http://www.bewitched.com/windmap.html .