Another Poem, With You

With You

Piece of pie
Clear blue sky
Mountain lakes
Leaves, and rakes

And when I am with you,
Two hearts filled with joy.
Our time passes softly,
Two hearts, one girl, one boy.

Teach me love
Teach me caring
I'll teach you happiness
I'll teach you daring

And when I am with you,
Two hearts filled with joy.
Our time passes softly,
Two hearts, one girl, one boy.

Another Poem, Longer With You

Longer With You

It took a little bit of time
for me to see and make them rhyme,
and when beneath the pen, the words, they stuck,
it took a bit more time to see, and pluck
them out for you, to read,
and us to hear, and laugh,
and spend a day, a year
together, and whether you want to
or need to depart, the mem'ry
of this time together
might smart,
but mem'ry is short
and time will start to pull
and stretch and fill our heart
with new times together
when never we part.

These things transferred to myself

Paul said (see 1 Cor. 4:2-6, emphasis mine):

Moveover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.

... yea, I judge not mine own self.

For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.

... And these things, brethren, I have in a figure transferred to myself and to Apollos for your sakes; that ye might learn in us not to think of men above that which is written, that no one of you be puffed up for one against the other.

Nephi said (see 1 Ne. 19:23, emphasis mine):

but that I might more fully persuade them to believe in the Lord their Redeemer I did read unto them that which was written by the prophet Isaiah; for I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning.

I see the following three ideas present in both statements:

1. habit of personalizing scriptural teaching
   
2. attempt to teach by example
3. making reference to prior patterns of personalization in a teaching situation
   

These scriptures are filled with a refreshing spirit of no-nonsense, concrete, step-by-step spiritual teaching. The teachers' attitudes are unassuming and direct.

I've been in teaching/learning situations like this, and it feels really good to have a teacher that both understands the material and is willing to put it on your level when explaining it.

I'm grateful for Paul's and Nephi's willingness to be as frank and humble as they were in these scriptures. It's been a blessing to me to read, compare, and contrast the two scriptures.

AN: Innovative genealogy information graphic

Yes, RootsTech was a month and a half ago, but this was important and I need to write about it.

I went to the lightning talks at RootsTech and saw a 5m presentation from Antoninus Niemiec, an MFA student from New York working on genealogy visualization. He called his presentation "Not Your Father's Chart".

With permission, here are two fuzzed views of the charts so you can get the overall picture.

Plate A is a traditional ancestry chart:


Plate B is the same ancestry, laid out in this new and innovative way:


Here is a close-up of a given family:


Antoninus presented a very innovative information graphic of a 5 generation ancestry. At a high level, his work is firmly grounded in Tufte's information graphic design priciples. There were no wasted pixels and no chartjunk, just content.

It was organized with a radial feel to it, with the descendant family clusters in the center, and ancestor family clusters radiating outward toward the edge of the page. Each family cluster was organized into two tree-rings, one for the father, one for the mother-and-children. Each tree ring meant a decade, birth and death dates were plotted on a 360 degree circle, angle determined my how far into the year the event happened.

He told me he is working on publishing this work on his website. He said he did it in Adobe InDesign using Javascript with some hand-tweaking afterwards.

This spawned an interesting conversation afterward about the possibility for a visualization challenge for RootsTech 2012:

• fixed content corpus
• released shortly before the conference
• awards in traditional media (print, web, video)
• award for most innovative visualization, regardless of format

BTW, this was the same lightning round that Tevya talked about.

Annotated pedigree on a timeline

Here is an idea for a new kind of pedigree display:

Annotated splay tree on a timeline

instead of the conventional:

Split tree with generational columns

I want to show you how this plays out for my family. There are enough steps, that I'd like to show each step, introducing one new display element at a time.

First, here is my family in traditional split tree, generational columns form:


Next, here is my family in splay tree form, still in generational columns:


Now, here is my family in traditional split tree form, but on a timeline:


Now, combine the two -- here is my family in splay tree form *and* on a timeline:


While it is interesting to see the generations grouped together, it would be interesting to see generational hints on the timelines themselves.

One annotation I found useful is something I want to call "generational progression". Ok, so the name is a rough cut, here is the legend:

• "<<<": time that this person lived before having the child that appears on this pedigree
• "===": time that this person lived *after* having the child that appears on this pedigree, but *before* having the grandchild (if any) that appears on this pedigree
• "---": time that this person lived *after* having any grandchild on this pedigree

Here is my family annotated in such a way in split tree form:


And annotated in splay tree form:


What would be nice is to have this graphically displayed, instead of my hokey text attempt. Also, it would be nice to have this be data-driven. But despite the hokey text format, this let me see things about my family that I had not been able to see before. Like how my Grandma was 6 when her mom died. And that I wanted to ask my dad about his memories of his grandpa who was still alive when my dad was 8 or something.

I met Janet Hovorka at the BYU Computerized Genealogy Conference. I saw her chart work, remembered this idea, showed this to her, and promised a writeup. This is my shot at keeping that promise, even if it's a little late. :)

The idea to put stuff on timelines and to annotate things graphically comes straight from listening to, and reading the works of Edward Tufte.