Building Rome in a Day: Crowdsourced 3D Cities

Reconstructing Rome, or what 496 computer cores and an autistic savant have in common.

Crowdsourcing has clearly been the cultural darling of late. And while some of its most successful applications, from Wikipedia to reCAPTCHA, rely on “active crowdsourcing” — building the collective product by actively soliciting user input — others are starting to work wonders with “passive crowdsourcing,” using user-contributed content that is already available on the web.

Building Rome in a Day, a new project out of the University of Washington GRAIL lab, does just that, using 150,000 Flickr images tagged “Rome” to reconstruct the iconic city in 3D. Because tourist photos are taken from a multitude of vantage points, stitching them together into a cohesive 3D image creates rich and spatially accurate models.

The Rome project, which took 21 hours on a cluster of 496 computer cores, reconstructed some of the city’s most famous landmarks — the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Cathedral, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon.

The team has also begun reconstructing other cities — Venice, which took 250,000 images and 65 hours, and Dubrovnik, at a more modest 57,845 photos and 22.5 hours.

The ongoing project has fascinating applications in reconstructing not only static landscapes, but also dynamic events as they unfold — in the era of citizen journalism, imagine using public images of anything from natural disasters (like the 2005 Indonesian tsunami) to political protests (like the recent unrest in Iran) to create an accurate record of history.

Or, you can always have a genius autistic savant fly over in a helicopter and draw frighteningly accurate panoramas on a 16-foot canvas.

via CT2

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Futility Paints Utility: Wikipedia Reproduced

A 5,000-page homage to the times, or what the Boston Molasses Disaster has to do with digital culture.

Wikipedia is the world’s most glorious case study in crowdsourcing. And its utility isn’t merely in the amount of information available, but also in the incredible accessibility of it — anything from a complete run-down of Seinfeld to the Boston Molasses Disaster is just a search box and a few hits on the keyboard away.

So what happens if the same immense pool of information were available, only in a much less user-friendly format?

That’s exactly what art student Rob Matthews explores in his Wikipedia reproduction project — a 5,000-page tome containing all of Wikipedia’s featured articles, so large and dense that the Gutenberg press would’ve chocked on it.

A completely preposterous proposition, the project is a testament to the digital convenience we’ve come to take for granted. It’s a brilliant homage to Wikipedia’s utility by painting the utter futility of its analog antithesis.

Reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource.

Now, instead of leafing through to page 1,327 of the fully printed Wikipedia, go read all about the Boston Molasses Disaster just by clicking here.

via GOOD

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Wordnik: The Dictionary Redefined

Exploring the Word Wide Web, or what Dr. Seuss can teach us about linguistic snobbery.

In 2007, lexicographer Erin McKean gave a TED talk that left many speechless with its keen insight about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries. This month, McKean launched Wordnik, her long-awaited solution to the problems she outlined in her talk.

Wordnik is an ongoing project out to discover all the words and all there is to know about them.

A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more. And it’s all compiled via user submissions.

Besides the makings of a next-gen dictionary, Wordnik is a refuge for linguistic underdogs and etymological rejects alike — and we love it. Because why should some stuffy Brit in his Oxford cubicle raise a disapproving eyebrow at the real language real people use and tell us that “brainpicker” isn’t actually a word?

Anyone who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction. [McKean @ TED]

For the full, straight-from-the-source scoop on Wordnik, check out this excellent interview with McKean on the TED Blog.

via Chris Anderson