A More Open Place: Photographing Privacy

What Mark Zuckerberg has to do with tyranny, memory and digital perishables.

Facebook is the largest photo-sharing platform in the world, with over 100 million photos uploaded daily by a half-billion active users worldwide. At the same time, Facebook’s ever-changing, ever-convoluted privacy policies remain among the most hotly debated issues on and about the social web. While most of the public discourse revolves around the personal information shared by and on Facebook, one particularly fascinating and unsettling aspect of the issue is how Facebook handles image rights — their terms state that any user automatically grants Facebook a sub-licensable, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license to any image uploaded on the site.

This form of digital tyranny is exactly what conceptual artist Phillip Maisel explores in his A More Open Place project — a series of images each produced by taking long-exposure photographs of a computer screen while flipping through a Facebook album. Inspired by a quote from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerber — who famously said, “We’re going to change the world. I think we can make the world a more open place.” — the project examines both our reaction to this digital deluge of photos and their fleeting nature.

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

The technology is such that it allows one to view photographs in albums in quick succession, infinitely looping. Because of this, an entire collection of photographs can be experienced in a matter of seconds. Documents of entire vacations, whose seasons, can blur by in an instant. In this way, I see the document becoming as fleeing as the moment it initially tried to capture.” ~ Phillip Maisel

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

The documentary and narrative capabilities of photography as a medium render it nearly perfect in its potential to act as a surrogate for memory. […] With the advent of websites like Facebook, the combination of technology and photography is playing an increasing role as a databank for our memories. At the same time, despite Facebook’s current popularity, its lasting prominence in our collective lives is uncertain, highlighting the ephemeral quality of photography in the digital age.” ~ Phillip Maisel

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

A More Open Place presents a compelling example of cross-platform, multimedia storytelling where a non-linear, unexpected narrative serves as the vehicle for an important social conversation about the givens of — as well as what is being taken by — the digital age.

via Photojojo

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SwiftRiver: Intelligence for the Information Age

What humanitarian crisis management has to do with brand monitoring and natural language.

Information management is easily the greatest challenge of the digital age, only intensifying as we go forth. While most of us make do with a careful selection of tools and a handful of trusted content curators, a holistic solution to information overload has been largely missing. Until now. Enter SwiftRiver, a brand new open-source intelligence gathering platform for managing real-time streams of data.

Developed by our friends at Ushahidi, whose platform of crowdsourced crisis information was the single most effective data management platform during the Haiti earthquake, SwiftRiver offers five different web services for validating and filtering real-time information:

• SiLCC is a natural-language processing tool that extracts semantic value from text — essentially, figuring out the human meaning of digital bits
• SULSa adds location context to content, which can be a life-or-death factor when responding to crisis information
• SiCDS reduces the number of duplicates, such as RT’s on Twitter that relay identical information without adding semantic value
• Reverberations measures the influence of content by weighing its popularity as it propagates across the social graph
• River ID scans the other four services to determine what and who is of value to different communities

Swift isn’t about replacing humans — it’s about maximizing their time.” ~ Jon Gosier

What makes SwiftRiver particularly noteworthy is its incredible range applications — from humanitarian crisis management to brand monitoring to political intelligence and beyond. What’s even more valuable is the multi-dimensional, relational way in which it approaches content — because the value of information is rarely absolute but, rather, relative to the context of who we are, what we do, where we live, and what else we know.

We have high hopes for SwiftRiver as the first tangible ray of hope for “curaggregation” — the holy-grail intersection of curation and aggregation. Give it a try.

via White African

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Art for the Age of Transparency: BBC DataArt

Layman geekery, or what documentary footage has to do with 3D and Brian Eno.

We’re big proponents of data visualization and believe it’s a potent tool for making sense of the increasing amount of information we’re being bombarded with. But despite a slew of fantastic work in this space over the past few years, there’s still relatively low public awareness and understanding of data viz as a creative discipline and a sensemaking tool.

That’s why we have high hopes for DataArt, a new project out of BBC Backstage aiming to offer examples of using data visualization in artistic and informative ways. Educational in nature, the learning portal is as much a showcase of compelling work as it is an introduction to the storytelling power of information visualization and a toolkit for joining this growing movement.

The DataArt project aims to introduce people to the power of information visualisation as a contemporary media form of increasing importance.

In an age where institutional transparency is no longer a courtesy but a demand, and companies, governments and other public entities are opening up their data to the public, the DataArt project offers a promising toolkit for understanding how ordinary people fan use data visualization to do anything from making better-informed decisions to expressing themselves creatively. With tools, tutorials, sample computer code and access to copyright-free data sources, the site is both a starting point and a destination, catering to a wide range of technical expertise levels and creative inclinations.

In blurring the boundary between art and information we hope this site will appeal to audiences interested in data visualisation in general, digital art and design, those interested in the BBC and those looking at data visualisation from an educational perspective.

Though currently pulling only from BBC data, the idea is to eventually sample other public sources as well. Four projects have been released so far: Flared Music is a simple Flash visualization displaying the relationships between musicians using the BBC Music API; 3D Documentary Explorer is an experiment in interactive storytelling, allowing you to look at the source material used in BBC documentaries in 3D; SearchWeb offers a tree-style glimpse of how BBC site search results are distributed across different categories; News Globe lets you search the BBC News & Sport website by keyword, with results plotted on a globe.

The project also encourages participation and collaboration, urging users to contribute and share their own work on the site. Part VisualComplexity, part GapMinder, part Processing, DataArt offers a promising wide-angle view of data visualization as an exploratory tool and a creative discipline.

We do hope to see more user-contributed work as well as a wider array of public data sets to play with.

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Popular Science, Digitized

137 years of human curiosity, or what lawnmowers have to do with nuclear detectives in China.

Thousands of magazines have stuffed our mailboxes and collected dust on our coffee tables over the years, but very few have captivated the attention of geeks and dreamers as long as Popular Science.

A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, Edward L. Youmans founded the publication to help bring scientific knowledge to the educated layman. Topics ranged the scientific gamut from the birth of electricity to the mystery of the brain. In addition to staff writers, our modern world of science has been covered by the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, T.H. Huxley, and Louis Pasteur.

Luckily for historians and the ever-curious, Popular Science has teamed up with Google to archive all 137 years of the magazine. (You may remember Google’s groundbreaking similar partnership with LIFE Magazine in late 2008.) Not only is this spectacular treasure of information free, but it’s available in original format — which means that besides enjoying antique articles about human-powered flying machines, you can also enjoy the advertisements of eras past. (Cigarettes, whiskey and riding lawnmowers seem to populate the 60’s.)

The archives aren’t indexed by volume. Instead, a fairly accurate search function brings up all the relevant articles from the past century for you to wade through. This time machine of science is beautiful to navigate, and even looks fantastic on the iPhone.

For those of you who are new to the archives, we’ve taken the liberty of finding a few nuggets of nostalgia to get you started:

The Moon — So Far (May, 1958): “Look hard, next full moon (April 3, May 3). Our oldest-established permanent satellite looms over the trees, familiar and close, yet mysterious and distant…We are ready to stretch across 240,000 miles to touch it…”

A nuclear detective looks at China’s atom bomb (Feb, 1965): “To an atomic scientist, what are the implications of China’s atomic bomb? We asked Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist who participated in the World War II Manhattan Project…”

Traveling telephones — new technology expands mobile service (Feb, 1978): “There’s a button labeled SND on Motorola’s futuristic –looking Pulsar II radiotelephone. I pushed it, and a number stored in its microcomputer memory began stepping, digit by digit, across the red LED handset display.

Go ahead, dive in.

Len Kendall is the cofounder of the3six5 project. (Featured on Brain Pickings here.) He enjoys being clever, quippy, and constructively grumpy.

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