Wandering Mice

Even mundane actions like scrolling the cursor across the screen generate interesting visualizations. IOGraph watches a user's mouse movements, giving us vizualizations of our pointer wheeling around the screen, large circles marking places where we paused. I generated this over the period of an hour in Louisville last year as I was writing a conference paper. The large circle at 3 o'clock signals either re-reading a section of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that I referenced during the talk or running downstairs for a beer.

Such information seems so quotidian as to lack importance, but the quotidian offers us unexpected joys: an infoviz form of nostalgia.

I remember pausing there when the sun broke through the windows and fell across the desk.

And that well-worn path, where I moved again and again to the iChat window to type three or four words to my wife. Apart but near.

Everyday, but important.