On Saturday, I think probably the best conference programs for me were the Ben Schneiderman keynote and a session on public library website redesign, taking a broad view – looking at service redesign, what services the library can provide through its website, not simply improving the look of the site – tho that was a big part of it, too.
Schneiderman talked about information visualization – he had one great graph of Republican vs. Democratic votes, over time, showing the polarization of the two parties; red and blue markers swimming away from each other – and he happily pointed out how the blue swam left and the red right, in the iteration of the graph he showed. He also had a nice example of how even NYT is using visualization now. I guess the HCI lab’s biggest software, NodeXL, doesn’t go on the Mac – but I’m sure there’re ways of getting around that.
We had Starbucks cookies for lunch, and I went back to the room to work.
Dinner was the Explorer’s Club – no pictures. Kind of a cross between Cuban & German & American comfort food. We had fried plantains for an appetizer. Abigail had the special, Schweinebraten – German pork roast with potato pancake & red cabbage, and I had bbg brisket and pork that came with baked beans, jalapeño cole slaw, and what they called corn pudding, but was more like a muffin. Mark had a spicy pasta and we split a pumpkin cream puff. The filling was good, the choux pastry a little tough. Went back to the hotel way too full, and got dozy watching SNL – not a very good one; the opener was the horrifying recap of the presidential debate, host Daniel Craig in several skits playing a working class idiot, both American and British, and can’t say the musical guest Muse was my idea of fun.
