Archive for May, 2009
May 15th, 2009
Our ShotSpot Presentation
Ron Kok and I presented Shotspot yesterday at “Visualizing our World of Data” in Amsterdam. Here is a pic, I’m the white shirt to the left:
How ShotSpot Works to Improve Upon Flickr:
If you find a photo on Flickr the geographic data (from the camera or set manually) will sometimes tell where the photo was taken. But where is the photographer from? You can’t tell. Looking at the Flickr API we realized that we could find the location of the user based on the location of their user account. We could then assume that if a user is taking pictures in a country other than his own that he is traveling.
What we’ve done with Shotspot is allow users of the application to look for trends in travel and make comparisons of photographs throughout the year or at different times of day.
Shotspot is for anyone interested in filtered large amounts of Flickr photos. But more specifically we hope that it will be a useful tool for photographers that want to compare photos and travel trends. Based on the data we hope they can then make a more auspicious decision on when to capturing a particular shot.
The Shotspot project was developed with the help of Ron Kok and Remon van den Bergh (Information Science @ University of Amsterdam) and Bohe Xie (MA Editorial Design @ MaHKU in Utrecht).
More Info
*Anne Helmond covered Shotspot and the event on the University of Amsterdam New Media blog.
*Also from yesterday’s event: check out the brilliant WorldMinder project that improves upon Gapminder – from my friends Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff, Arthur Stobbelaar and Lisa Ing.
May 12th, 2009
Visualizing Our World of Data
We will be presenting our project ShotSpot at CREA Theatre on May 14, 2009. It’s free entrance (and there is rumor of some free drinks as well).
May 3rd, 2009
3rd Prize in the BlueSky Innovation Competition!
Looks like I won 3rd Prize and $500 in the UC Santa Barbara BlueSky Innovation Competition for my submission Anatomical Analytics. Here is the full announcement and some highlights from my entry.
May 1st, 2009
Amateur Spies and Facebook Schizophrenia
The following is an abstract I submitted to Wiley-Blackwell Publishing for possible inclusion in their upcoming book Facebook & Philosophy:
Amateur Spies and Facebook Schizophrenia:
The News Feed Makes it More Difficult to Lie
The Facebook News Feed ensures that we will never be alone again—for better or for worse. By piecing together fractions of our friends’ lives, it sets the tone for a dystopian-style ‘ambient awareness’ in which we are constantly watching each other out of the corners of our eyes. The News Feed epitomizes media theorist Neil Postman’s outcry that we have become a culture controlled by our obsession with entertainment. Postman illustrates how our culture is less like that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother controlled society by depriving the public of information, and more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where the public is “reduced to passivity and egoism” as they “drown in a sea of irrelevance.”
One thing that Facebook does have in common with Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, is the concept of amateur surveillance. Importantly, it is the “amateur spies” of the Thought Police who pose just as great a risk as Big Brother, and who ultimately lead to the protagonists’ tragic fate. With Facebook we all have the potential to be amateur spies. The ability to monitor the lives of hundreds of people at a glance is reminiscent of Michael Foucault’s Panopticon, where the central guard can keep an eye on all the prisoners at once. On Facebook, the corresponding metaphor might be that each of us occupies the position of the central guard while at the same time being permanently visible as the prisoner.
Interestingly, due to our knowledge of this surveillance and the fear that any one of our friends has the power to broadcast into our News Feed, we are disciplined to be honest. Furthermore, struggles between our need to be the object of another’s desire (Jacques Lacan’s ‘paranoid knowledge’) and our fear of Foucault’s “inspecting gaze”, lead to a type of schizophrenia where we simultaneously divulge our most private details in the form of status updates, while being paranoid of being tagged in compromising photos. With every new friend we add we willingly sacrifice privacy for pleasure, and in doing so we become more accountable though paranoid.