Mar 07 2013
Data Science, Technology

DIY Data Science + De:bugging Biometrics: balancing bioart, sensor intel, and responsive cityscapes

IMG_0297 (1)IMG_0387

A few recent articles about neuro- and cognitive science and last month’s GenSpace Talk have sparked my curiosity about the dual capacity of sensor networks to empower a sentient cityscape and to enable biometric surveillance. The forming being a rather rad consequence of a more digitally developed infrastructure, the latter being the horror storythat hangs on our most distopic scifi futures. So what is the balance when dealing with art and code? How do we manage the development of new technologies which allow us hyper-personal transactions at the expense of anonymity?

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According to an article in Science Daily, researchers at Cornell have started to used fMRI scans to predict not just how a person is processing information and in what neurological buckets the activity is dominant, but even who a person is thinking about. Not to be outdone, MIT recently went public with some MatLab code that uses and Eulerian algo to amplify pixels and detect pulse and subcutaneous activity from video files. Meanwhile, what about the prophesied Google Glass and it’s potential to kickstart ‘surveillance’ as a cinema sub-genre? In all cases, we have new windows to our own biology viasecond-hand technological captures. While primarily scientific, these developments have implications for imaging outside of the scientific realm; what new visual art projects might also be augmented by these processing scripts? How will bioart pick up the scientific slack and use open sourced code to develop critical artscience?

When challenged to hack away and build something in the theme of GodMode for 319 Scholes’ Art Hack Day in Brooklyn this weekend, a few of us decided to tackle thanks MM Moser for the logo aidbiometrics andsurveillance with a spoof film, garnering a bit of nerdfamery and some cool coverage along the way (Creator’s Project | Fast.co). Our project, DIY Spoofing for DNA Counter-surveillance, was shot, edited and exhibited in a slurried 36 hour sprint, adapted some Gattaca-like insecurities about the trajectory of genetic surveillance. Check out the project here, and browse the vimeo links to research participant hackers and our other press pages. The whole experience of hacker/artist immersion was infectiously inspiring and full of smart kids in fancy kicks #godmode. In the open source spirit, we submitted the video as a set of DIY protips on how to blend your DNA with that of a friend, then shed both samples in simultaneity, to scramble surveillance readings. However fun and simple our execution, the themes of human tracking

via biometric analysis and the role of the post-modern bioartist in critically questioning this tracking were clear. We were all amateurs in many ways, but the

ubiquity of sensingtechnologies and send-away DNA analysis services in our modern cities points to the validity of our concept. How might a project likethis scale beyond a weekend hackathon and a posting on Instructables? How might these themes persist as they propagate in our cities?

Case in point, this week’s submissions to the NYC Reinvent Payphones project solicited several proposals for more “aware” telephone technologies. My company was asked to develop ways to augment underutilized street furniture and part of this process involved an impressive network of sensing technologies to permit data collection and a more personalized and locally sensitive experience. The implication was the soon these ‘augmented’ booths might permit not only private phone calls but intimate and hyper-personalized transactions, automating and diffusing the pressure of city services such as  polling and election activities, postal services, and the DMV. Oh my.

Check out press: Engadget | the Verge | NYDaily News | the Gothamist | FastCo !

Please vote for our video here so that we can transform the NYC payphones!

ah_ 2013-03-05 at 4.39.41 PM

But what if authentication becomes biometric? Is that fair? Do we want all of our identification to be linked to our biology? If someone spoofs our biological identity rather than spoofing surveillance, are we comfortable with allowing them access to our civic, political, and personal lives? Probably not, but we probably will be soon enough. Doubtless that many people will opt to log in with their default bio-credentials when possible, forgetting that these features, once hacked, cannot be scrambled or reissued, md5 hashed and emailed again to our ‘private’ accounts  in the physical world as they can in the digital.  Moral of the story? Keep tabs on your preference settings, keep your friends swap/spoof close, and your privacy radar closer.

Follow the Art Hack Day Press: Animal | Le Nouvel Observateur

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Mar 04 2013
Education, Technology

Mastering the Wizardry of CS and Edu ++

There has been a dramatic lag in my contribution to this site of late, loads of new projects, full time work plus sporadic thesis guilt conspired to prevent a posting until now.

A few things I’m up to:

Girl Develop IT Code and Coffee (Feburary 5th)

Radio Show (Sundays, 9-10PM)

ArtSec Demo Projection

ArtSec Demo Projection

Conversely, my internet activities are pretty consistent off of this site. Look for my posts here (Control Group, Girl Develop It), some comments in the Google group (Art Sec), and check out my archived radio shows here.  I’ve made a few videos with cool prototypes in physical computing as well, including LED blink programs. Most of the photos in this post cull from recent events and otherwise awesome goings on. With that, explaining, I’ll proceed to some more substantive commentary.

For this post I want to focus on a consistent preoccupation of mine, one that I think bridges all of the above enumerated activities: education. As a librarian, it’s increasingly hard to abandon the idea of research for a purpose, which is pretty ubiquitous in education, the idea of consistent and independent edification. I’ve been collecting articles and thinking about this for a while.

Human Face of Big Data

Human Face of Big Data

At Bloomberg’s World IA Day (February 9th), Rich Smolan talked about positive impact of data analysis en masse, for building the potential of networked intelligence, for translating ugly data into meaningful information and contributing to the global nervous system that the internet provides. With large amounts of collective data about our population and behaviors, we are actively architecting an engine for understanding our world. Education in how to process information of this complexity and quantity is key. So, a consistent topic of discussion was what is the right balance of education in Information Architecture?

But perhaps more pertinent and consistent, the question of how soon to education and in what sequence of curricula we might begin teaching about big data and programming. Should we begin by reinforcing mathematics and logic because they are the foundation of careful thought in computation? Should we jump to scripting, robots, and physical computing because they are the jazzy IRL exactions of programming? Should we leave it to students and promote programming and data fluency in general?

Where should we start? Of late I’ve been engaged in some peripheral education exercises, wrapping up as a metadata T.A. at Pratt left me with a nostalgia for teaching and the above event list is just a catalog of my tangential pursuits in

Education and Outreach: More technicolor data plz!

Education and Outreach: More technicolor data plz!

information nerdery. It made me think about what I might be competent to teach and what I would want to teach, and part of my work with Girl Develop It has only continuously affirmed that I want to work with data and I want to teach people how to use it for the types of progressive applications that Smolan talks about in his The Human Face of Big Data. Programming is inching toward ubiquity even in obligatory curricula, and even a more basic understanding of balance in structuring and formatting data for consumption will soon be a prerequisite for a high school curriculum in CS. This was a topic that I revisited a few weeks ago when I taught a class at the Academy for Software Engineering, a new Manhattan High School focused on teaching programming in tandem with typical coursework. Part of their Functions and Data Analysis curriculum, the class was about teaching 9th graders how to approach the ubiquity and enormity of data output that they unconsciously contribute to on the daily. Most of the class was just straight up Big Data, but understanding how to structure data, how to architect and organize information for usability is an interdisciplinary skill worth cultivating at all educational levels, whether professional (as at World IA Day), collegiate, or early educational.

Check out the presentation here: CGBigData-AFSE-1.3.13

Likewise, at this month’s Open Data Day, I focused on building out a series of collaborative iPython Notebooks in PiCloud to create the skeleton of a collaborative programming curriculum in Python for Girl Develop It. Ideally, the notebooks would allow me to segment blocks of code and wrap them in a user friendly set of READ.ME-like comments in markdown. I could then share the notebooks with students and collaborators who could run the code blocks individually and process the interactive lesson plan before them as a UI-friendly literate programming environment. Developing literacy  at the expense of obscurity here is key to encouraging new programmers.

Working hard at being a nerd

Working hard at being a nerd

So, in considering all of the above, I naturally thought about my own habits of continuous education since college, about how I’ve supplemented my traditional curriculum to afford forays into CS and programming when that was not/never my primary program of study. And also about who encouraged this study and what kept me going.

Were I teaching a college course in information architecture, I would teach my students to…

  • pursue independent study (rare book school/hacker school, code.org, codeacademy, )
  • mentor and expect reciprocal mentorship from your superiors
Collabo-nerding

Collabo-nerding

  • participate in regular portfolio critique as an exercise
  • learn something outside of the nebulous field you participate in professionally, because those soundbites of even abbreviated variety in intelligence are so surprisingly significant for persuade
  • learn a really lean/agile process (aside from the  learning more about accessibility)
  • design for extremity to outperform use cases, you will never be disappointed and can scale this practice with experience

The reality is that most brilliant things that develop from your education after age 21 are probably things you designed and built yourself. Honing your skill set through regular exercises outside of your traditional workflows (extra classes, hackathons, meetups) are

Pitching ideas at Open Data Day NYC

Pitching ideas at Open Data Day NYC

an essential part of the continuous learning process. One of the unspoken (or maybe spoken) refrains of graduate school is that you don’t really need to go to grad school (something you realize inevitably and only while you’re there). Most education is just a framework for realizing your own potential; the older you are the more apparent this becomes, the more you must make independent effort to educate yourself outside of an obligatory education track. Encouragement can help (see code.org video or the Take the Pledge series from CS Ed Week – look out for my cameo!):

As a concluding point, I used to think that people who defended “liberal arts education” where trying to justify their own youthful unprofessional orientation, but I have come to recognize that the peculiar demands of most professions are irrelevant if you fail to communicate and complicate your own ideas. This is something that liberal arts teach you, how to build on your own concepts and inform or affirm them with research and critical theory. Intelligent people are remarkable problem solvers. If you train an intelligent person to approach your problem set, he will make progress toward a solution; diversity in education enriches this capacity. The answer to questions of more creativity and a more informed approach to architecture anchors in an independent and continuous education.

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Oct 15 2012
Conferences, Technology

Absentee Archiving: why autumn is the most Occupied of seasons

Apologies, I’ve been an absentee archivist for the past month, overwhelmed as I am with all of the new excitement that the Fall semester brings. I’m writing now in brief to announce a brief blog hiatus thanks to my thesis (yikes!) and guest blogging activity, which will now be absorbing writing precedence until I submit in (gasp) December. A big part of my recent activity has been some fumble attempts at front end programming and some event planning for Girl Develop It, the non-profit I volunteer for that teaches women how to code in low-cost classes; accordingly, I’ve peppered this post with graphs I’ve charted (thank you Michael for showing me the magic of HighCharts) and female dev-ful events I’ve hosted. As this is an all-over-the-place post, I’ve tagged it up with some tagging refs. If you’ve been following this blog *applause*, you will know my affinity for tags (these, and these, and these) in all of  their semantic iterations (as per previous blog post). What follows are some bulleted updates on upcoming excitement.

  • Archives Documentary: Thanks to some friends and recent side projects, I’m increasingly fascinated by 3rd party archive projects. A friend at Eyebeam is on residency to create a documentary around themes of preservation of internet memory (and meme-ory). I recently gave a tour of the internet, and have been following the blog (http://archivefilm.tumblr.com/). If you dig data you should too.

  • Radio Show: My show is now underway *whoot*. Look under the projects tab (Projects > Radio) to find my archived episodes throughout the next few months. Inspired by the Semantic Web and that 70s show Connections, I DJ Stereo Semantics, an experiment in sonic degrees of degrees of separation. Sundays – 9-10pm EST.
  • Art/Education Projects: Game of Phones; I’ve been the lucky lady added to the Game of Phones queue and now that I’m oh man it’s addictive. Rather refreshing to watch actual phone use supersede all of the killer apps that now bog my “smart[er?]” phone (thanks David Lublin). Inspired by some cool open data postings on the ArtSec (Art + Security, you’ll know if from #artstech fame) google Group, I worked with a Miso/High Charts Stack to visualize some Graffiti tagging data from the NYC open data portal (thanks Michael Keller for the R aid). I’ve captioned a few vis examples and am looking forward to plotting this on a map soon.
  • 3rd Party Blogs: Control Group, Girl Develop It. Check out my recent posts @ControlGroup and @GDI: Technology for all: It’s a Gal++ World, relative to my Women in Tech volunteer projects. IA few weeks ago, I had the privilege Todd Park, CTO of the US, to discuss policy related to Women in Technology and their Presidential Fellows program (a fellowship which attracts a paucity of female applicants), with NY Tech Meetup and representatives of women and tech initiatives around NYC. Working with GDI and Hack n’Jill to promote a more egalitarian techscape is ever-fulfilling and certainly an important building block of brilliant and beautiful products in STEM fields. I’m happy to be a part of it.

  • Metadata Course: However under qualified I may be, I’m also assisting with a Metadata course at Pratt on Saturday mornings, designing excercises and curricula to compliment a syllabus of mainly XML implementations of metadata schemas. Of late, I’m a bit frustrated with the kludgyness of the Moodle microblogging system that’s baked into Pratt’s course enrollment and learning management software, so I’ll be migrating class content and posts to a WordPress Blog (to flesh out slowly, stay tuned!).

  • Hackathons: Data Kind/Occupy Hackathon/Hack n’ Jill. While I rarely have adequate bandwidth or energy on my weekends, I recently had the pleasure of contributing remotely to an Occupy Hackathon aimed at making use of the rich data collected throughout Occupy and its affiliated movements. Likewise, I was fortunate enough to learn from the Data Kind Data Dive, visualizing NYC Parks Data a few weeks ago; this introduced me to a pretty brilliant assortment of geo-vis tech stacks, and CartoDB, which I have become subsequently obsessed with and will happily share with whomever I can: http://cartodb.com/. My company and Girl Develop It are also partnering with Hack n’ Jill  to host a 2 day Hacksgiving at Etsy.

Sign up here: http://hacksgiving.eventbrite.com/. and come out the weekend of November 9-10th to see some rad hacks!

  • Conferences: LISA, Strata, Visualized, SIGGRAPH-Asia. If you’re in NYC and want to catch me at some conferences, I’ll be volunteering at LISA and Visualized. I’ll be attending the big data nerd conf in NYC in two weeks: http://strataconf.com/. And I have been graciously awarded funding to participate in Siggraph Asia 2012, so I’ll be off to Singapore in a wee few weeks (h1ph1ph00ray): http://www.siggraph.org/asia2012/en.

So those are the haps! Oh and I was also featured in these random but delightful things: MSN Glo article, librarian conference article. Thanks for reading, friends, join me at any of the upcoming events above, and send in your radio show rec’s to auremoser@gmail.com!

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Jul 22 2012
Music, Technology

Consider in Chrome: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Dark Dark

Sometimes, I have the impulse to write something profound on this  blog, but now, now is not one of those times. Now is the time I want to talk about music and webmagic so here goes with a self-indulgent slurry of the sweet things the web (GL or otherwise) has served me of late. I want to reference a recent Google adventure as well as an upcoming radio program I’ve been daydreaming of late. For visual interest, I’m going to spill some surrealism all over this with a bit of themed imagery, some daydreamy AV to dew drop drizzle  on your day.

The title of this post appropriately sweeps all of those topics under some semblance of unity. I work a lot in chrome, that is, chrome before it was Chrome™. I work a lot in browsers (chromes) now, and as a chem T.A. at an art school, I worked loads with chrom-ium based pigments. It’s a pretty colorful element, chromium, with a Greek root it couples with a variety of suffixes to produce “colorful” adjectives, band names, among other references. Hello, Chromeo, the Chromatics, Sonichrome (honey, please is a swoonworthy track in my brain), and what about the Chromes on It, Telepathe remix? But that’s not the “Chrome” I’m talking about. The chrome I’m talking about is a browser window, and has become the property of Google projects for some time. Though perhaps not obvious now, the reason I digress with all of these references and etymological diversions, is, in part, to preface a discussion of some totally rad google projects, and in part to introduce a semantic web approach to music that I’m packaging as a radio show come Fall 2013.


<  suspense >

Title Part I: Google Chromecacheedansleforet

Firstly, let’s shed some light on the Google stuff and then on to the open source.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to beta-test a pretty rad application out of Google’s Data Arts dept. (thanks, Aaron * waves *). Entitled “This Exquisite Forest,” the experiment is a collab webproject where you plant an animated image and watch it grow through a system of crowdsourced contributions that branch from your budding idea (apologies for the extended puns, it is my way). It’s been clocked as a kind of version control for images, that transforms the surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawings into a digital project. Under the username “puddingmaster,” I started an 8-frame animation of a staircase, that was transformed by 5 other users into games of tetris, portraits, and geometric puzzles. It’s pretty cool, and now that it’s public, I feel comfortable gushing about how awesome it is.

Finally there is a weboutlet for my surrealist obsessions and it doesn’t involve youtube or remixes of Luis Buñuel films (nb: the surrealist echo in the featured “cachée dans la forêt” piece above). Most of the animations are pretty impressive in the forest, from DMirada’s enigmatic amoebas called “Evolving,” to RaquibShaw’s rather screensaver-stunning “Forgotten gardens of Xanadu,” the trees range in level of contribution and complexity. But pretty much everyone outdoes my stick-figure staircase and I still scored 4 branches and a rebase (WHAAT? Yes).

In addition to animations, you can author your own musical track to accompany the 8-frame image playback, and this feature seemed to correlate brilliantly with some other online obsessions of mine, that have been incubating for a while.

Of late, I’ve been messing around with Chrome’s WebLab Orchestra, which I highly recommend. And the old-school audio cassette on Tympanus allows for some distracting play in html 5. I remember when the Sembeo Sound matrix was my go-to distraction in Flash, reminding me a lot of some incredibox.fr experiments I was running a few years ago. When I started guesting on a radio show in college, I remember thinking how cool it would be to automate call-in requests, allowing people to compose music with keypad menu selection, or at least to select genres and then create collab broadcasts, exquisite-corpse their way through a show, if you will. With all the music genome projects live of late, it seems we have an internet radio infrastructure that people can sample and curate and collaborate without any particular knowledge of how all of these connections and html 5 elements integrate.  The internet and its architects give us the instruments, and all we have to do is google moog our way to play.

Title Part II: Radio DayDreams

And all of this music segues somewhat into a project I’m working on for the Fall. Inspired by my continued fascination with the semantic web, I’m starting a semweb radio series at Pratt Institute when the new semester kickstarts. It’s called Stereo Semantics and the premise pretty simple. I start with a song, I close with it’s cover, I stitch together the six degrees that separate the two.  I’ll be uploading archived episodes to the site along with a RelFinder map connecting the first song to the last, possibly with comments; ultimately I’d like to run my own musical Milgram experiments and see how it spreads. I’ve developed umpteen example playlists for this project, but I thought a shoutout to my daydreaming theme would suit this post. So, here goes….

A. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the ….

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark have been a pretty solid substrate of my Pandora playlist library for a few years. I love the theatricality, the dancehall catchiness, the genre ambiguity and the science references. [Electricity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq2vl99iIEc] I played OMD in an embarrassing amount of radio show broadcasts as a wee DJ on student radio…there’s something so relaxing for me about shoegaze and brit pop. They also have a song about dreaming, which has been covered  by everything from glitch to  ukulele online. I’d like to to find ways to connect those tracks, to show how this bass player transitioned to that band, and made music with this beat or this chord progression that you can also here in _this song. Soon the semweb will build these maps for me, beautifully. But there’s something to analog over algorithm, to assembling things manually in stitches of musical nostalgia; Stereo Semantics will tease out that idea.

B. …Dark Dark Dark

After SxSW, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Dark Dark Dark. Among many, many noteworthy others, they have a song called “DayDreaming” which I’ve captioned here:

And what about * scans itunes library *

  • M83–Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
  • The Magnetic Fields–Asleep and Dreaming
  • Chet Baker–Daydream
  • Sonic Youth–Daydream Nation

AND

  • Themselves–Dark Sky Demo
  • Kanye–Dark Fantasy
  • Hot Chip–Made in the Dark
  • Death Cab–I will follow you into the Dark

Even on a completely superficial kw:_  level, this theming is going to be fun.

While I wouldn’t say I’ve progressed beyond the OMD/New Wave music of my more youthful days, I might admit that Dark Dark Dark is more of the hipster tunage that I sample since starting grad school. Sometimes the ridiculous melodrama of “chamber baroque folk music” makes me shudder, but often it just helps me wind down after a long day. I want to build a bridge between those two , and track a timeline of my musical trajectory over the past few years. SSemantics will be a kind of musical scrapbook, and I’m happy to take topic suggestions, or even, yes even call-ins (see my contact page if you think of something particularly rad). Stay tuned!

< / suspense >

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Jun 23 2012
Technology, UI

Presentations + Pretty Things: metamodel for library data

It has been a long lapse since my last post and this lo-fl blog is becoming borderline lo-fun. Summer has brought sunny weather and a super-mix of exciting events for me: EVA in Firenze, THATCamp in NYC, Eyeo in Minneapolis, and finally ALA in Anaheim (from where I’m currently crafting this posting). So in honor of Alan Turing’s b-day  * h1p_h1p_H-00-RAY* I am posting a much belated update. As a follow-up to my talk last month at EVA Florence on Preservation Metadata for Electronic Art Installations (#mouthfulofnerdy), I decided to author a summary of my recent program adventures from sunny and swell Firenze, followed by some comments on good design for library data. As per uszhe, I included lot of planets and pictures of space to power you through what promises to be a long posting.

Firstly, my presentation discussed a portion of my thesis topic on preservation Metamatics pdf coverpagemetadata and conservation practice for new media and net.art, coupled with a decidedly New York-centric focus (as was encouraged since I represented ½  of the American constituency in attendance). As I promised to orchestrate a slide-share of sorts, I’ll post an abbreviated but attractive version of my slides, minus some video, citation marginalia, and more advanced descriptive content as a pdf of a ppt. For those who dug my formatting (hello, I love you), sorry, but the Consolas + Calibri typeface magnifimashup does not translate with a downgrade some of my color spaces are also skewed; I think you’re seeing a florescent version of Calibri text.  But I’m sure the people skimming my resource page really could careless than I do about that.

Download the pdf here: EVAPresMetadata

Now that I’m over the conference hump (EVA + EYEO+ ALA ohmy!), this short pocket of blissful break from the blog has made me restless so I’ve decided to pick-up a few pbsdatavis01lost threads that I’ve left trailing along the way. This will be a post about the need for data visualization nerds to jump on the metadata and electronic media bandwagon. In recent news, a few informal speaking engagements within the library community have left me frustrated with the slow pace of cultural institutions in the face of data vis; these organizations have only the best data at their disposal. Modest projects for visualizing and presenting these data exist, to be sure, and are impressive, but a more ambitious push to participate in social visualization tools, or at least to enable these visual devs as open data APIs is needed.

The weighty rhetoric of the library and archives world (I’m looking at you “repositories”) loses a bit of the play and processing snazziness of partner projects in news and advertising environments. As libraries, we’ve become woefully slow on the uptake of participation in animation and visualization initiatives even when the libraries and the github links are there (hello Timeline.js, and Fusion Tables). There’s still a persistent gap between how libraries present and illustrate their data, and how corporate entities organize and manage product promotions by establishing an attractive online presence; libraries lack the visual. There’s a lingering wall of intimidation between the library world and the IA/Developer world, and we need to close that gap.

Case Study: Conference Sites

Look at the ALA-Anaheim conference website: http://www.alaannual.org/

Now try to navigate.

#yikes

I’m not going to hate too much, since criticism should beget solutions rather that pbsdatavis_take2whine and cheese. But in comparison to Eyeo [http://eyeofestival.com/] and SxSW [http://sxsw.com/] (which boast a pretty profound data set of events and information), the libraryland conferences are a cocktail of cumbersome and creatively-challenged. To soften the brutality of that screencap, I am also peppering this post with some pretty attractive data vis coming out of a pbs program you may have heard about: America Revealed.  Mapping arial data about internet usage and across the US produces some beautiful swirly planet patternings. Even the pizza delivery routes in manhattan looke brilliant in blue light:

This echoed some other swell projects I’ve been seeing including this map (author unknown…maybe Jer Thorp?) of weather eruption patterns over time, projected in pbsdatavis_take3circular plumes (best if viewed in Chrome): http://vizzuality.github.com/HTML5-experiments/earthquakes/index.html#2/39.5/-74.0

The first lesson in Processing is an education in how to render circles with animation software: http://processing.org/learning/gettingstarted/

…so starting out with creative code and attractive vis is not that difficult, and as pbs and git can attest is furthermore pretty appealing on a universal scope. People like ellipses and curves, there’s a particular attraction to bubbles and bobbles as nodes of information, as planetary points on our navigation through an interweb solar system of impacted data sets. Even static vis shares a love of swirls and circles. See: http://www.howtogeek.com/92976/50-years-of-space-exploration-infographic/

NB:

We Feel Fine [http://wefeelfine.org/]

The Dumpster : [http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/]

Bloom/Hodgin’s Planetary app: [http://blog.bloom.io/]

Take the above as examples of that. There are ways to render library data in pbsdatavis_take3informative bubblesets, There are ways of illustrating the popularity of certain dewey  100 blocks visavis checkouts rates, ways of ranking library “departments” and charting them as a newsmap  (hint: dewey just became RDF-enabled: http://dewey.info/).

There is so much potential bundled in library data, and so much feasible datavis to build. There is a programmatic learning curve for some software applications, and it’s unfair to demand better datavis without acknowledging the limited budgets and programmatic expertise that affects library projects; but if Code for America can mobilize volunteers to push  government data out of cmd-line prison, there must be a comparable movement in America’s libraries * call-to-action face*. And anyway, perhaps I am a bit biased, but I am BIG on pedagogy in programming, less on the pretense. Some of the most fascinating things I’ve learned have been through free online tutorials and ad hoc apprenticeships with my coder friends who knew way more than I did and were willing to chaperone me as I tumbled my way through projects; and that includes data projects conducted at library venues. We no longer occupy a world of lone-gunmen genius…more a collaboration space where several geniuses combine skills to build brilliant things. Computers, with their open-ended potential as platforms for n projects foster that kind of networked intelligence and collaboration in obvious ways. So let’s go libraries, let’s collaborate and create pretty things!

Last month’s THATCamp Museums touched on new ways to make collections visible; harnessing the power of the timeline to create visualizations of information that map content to concrete nodes in time, and visualize those points:

http://timeline.verite.co/examples/user-interface/

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/03/sxswlam-libraries-archives-and-museums-in-an-interactive-world/

So as a wrap-up to what has become a long read, let’s just close with some symmetry and some Alan Turing shout outs [http://www.legoturingmachine.org/]. Just because we deal with ugly data sets doesn’t mean our representation of that information has to be likewise hideous. Even Turing’s most impressive mathematical and computational outputs (including ACE among others) were the product of design. Arguably, everything within the range of human interface is the product of design, and there’s no reason to promote unattractive and empty data vis, no reason to de-sign our signifier-rich data in libraries. HBD Alan Turing, HBD.

LEGO Turing Machine from ecalpemos on Vimeo.

Check out the following and give visualization a whirl:

http://processing.org/

http://libcinder.org/

http://flare.prefuse.org/

http://fellinlovewithdata.com/guides/data-vis-beginners-toolkit-2

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Apr 27 2012
Uncategorized

Digital Preservation: an ongoing aside


Area 51 profile for Aurelia Moser

Without bracketing this in anything particularly profound, I’d like to offer the following plug for Area 51′s Digital Preservation Forum. A Stack Overflow dish sesh site for librarians and cultural heritage professionals grappling with the data deluge and preservation concerns of our New Media-driven collections. It’s currently at the 11% committal rate en route to 100%. Help out by committing or contributing if you can: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/39787/digital-preservation?referrer=RSIIIoYsakUl8-Pye4BdZw2

Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Digital Preservation

Apr 21 2012
Music, Technology

Requiem for RSD: Technostalgia and Ephemedia

On this auspicious RSD, delightfully coined as a ‘nerd’s Black Friday,’ I thought I would craft a post on our current cultural fascination (and my eternal obsession) with old tech. From the vinyl swoonage of my inner hipster streams an affection for older media formats. In the spirit of my typically mashup blogstructure, I’ve peppered the following with a dose of nerdery, John Hughes refs (Pretty in Pink record store heyyah) and a decidedly-dork link drop.
Elsewhere on the internet, T Berners-Lee (#semweb<3) issued a rather relevant press dispatch providing some worthwhile, if informally articulated,  perspective on legislation to limit piracy as piloted by record labels (see: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/berners-lee-dont-let-record-labels-upset-web-openness.ars). One wonders in retrospect how the internet inspired these legal concerns, how old music media slowed legislative headache in its low-tech limitations, and for this among other reasons, I’ve defaulted to a rather luddite posting.
I write this with a pang of resistance, as it is with rarity that I self-identify as old It's hot, White Hot(*shudder*) but the current technological timeline chronicling our collective [te]Xistence demands a certain comfort with the realization that the ’90s were a while ago, that the internet dawned a while ago…and that we’re now in the swelling season of rapidly appreciating generations of hardware. How we will grapple with this ephemedia has become a buzz topic in the archives and art worlds alike, as projects in net.art and new media demand a new approach to conservation, and a particular perspective on the romance of technostalgia to support those programs and projects we choose to preserve.
I’ll begin with an anecdotal <aside>
When I first considered art restoration as a career path, I accepted that chemistry and art history would have to blend in an rather bizarre educational program defined by my own crosswalk of departments and operated on a platform of optimism + obscure nerdery. With time, my interest in contemporary art favored an education in code over chem, and it is with honesty that I acknowledge the importance of technology for long-term preservation of our postmodern cultural memory, conducted in the catalogs and crosswalk metadata maps of colloquial web archive known as the internet. Our affection for the grooves and snapcracklepop of vinyl, for album art and liner notes in the age of paperless playlists à la Pandora coordinates well with our nerdy re:interest in former formats, and the now obsolete storage devices of our early internet da[ze]. What some of my undergrad students reference as “old school” now collects in a rather pathetic category that includes Mac products with the rainbow apple-logo, and the dial-up tones that at one point audio-tuned the boot-up. #betTheresARingtone. We have a whole tag vocabulary that equates 10-year old techologies with “vintage” and “retro”, and a rather anachronistic attraction to self-identifying as “analog”  All this is fascinating in such a collapsed timeline…tech tempis fugit indeed.
</aside>
Rhizome epublished a blog post about this type of phenomenon, entitled Projected Projects: Slides, Powerpoint, and a Sense of Belonging, and my own recent treatment of it can be attributed to a techcrunch article about Prince of Persia complimented by BIG computer geekthis lecture by Doug Reside (digital palimpsests…see previous postings). All of the aforementioned in some way contributes to a contemporary catalog of our attraction to old media, and the attempt to both preserve previous formats and furnish persistent platforms to host those products that defined how we all grew up with the internet, that characterized our carousel through technoyouth. Those of us who recall the pluckiness of a polaroid or the plastactile quality of  the floppy now watch as these filter to the techvogue of a new generation. Consider the current cool of “retro” gaming like “5th avenue frogger” or the techno trope of the wizard/princess single player set-up (see photo).
But with companies like Kodak sloowwwwly retiring from the media memory-making that has so long been their default domain (I’m looking at you microfiche), we must also confront this nostalgia with caution, and potentially with alarm.
Fred Kilgour: Microfilm will be “one of the most important developments in the transmission of the printed word since Gutenberg.” Christian Science Monitor Magazine (9/14/1940)
Steve Paul Johnson: ”End of Microfilm?” on census information and microfilm obsolescence (12/19/1999)
It remains near-impossible to predict the success or failure of any-one medium (case in point: quotes below; case in point the undulating popularity of all music/movie media, vinyl included). The thumbdrives and cartridges of our techmemory are not immune to that same obsolescence, in fact, they might be the most vulnerable carriers of our culture to date. What of our digital memories? Wherewith our technochronology preservation protocols? Will the fbook journals be our only catalogue of online identity in the 2000s? Will our digital anecdotes and assets be clustered in a dubious Cloud? Will we even want memories, or will we allow our historic [hyper]texts to devolve to droplinks and the deepweb darkrooms of archival ether. Remember the Eloi and their apathy about intellectual memory (if you remember the book). If not (*gasp* *feelsAncient* *sulks*): remember that Wishbone episode where Weena laughs when HG Wellsbone paws through the crumbling pages of the archives (oh look, here’s a lo-fi reminder: http://www.colemanzone.com/Time_Machine_Project/BarkFuture(2).htm)  yep, that’s the state of things.
I’ll punctuate this with a pile-up of unanswered questions and some “retro” screen captures featuring the old tech that some of us know, and many of us miss. On this record store day, I’m compelled to re:member technology’s incarnations in my lifetime, as I’ve watched photochemical captures transition to media memory banks that might just be bankrupt in the space of a decade. RSD and other affections for old media, I salute you.
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Apr 01 2012
Conferences, UI

Let’s all go to the ZUI

For about two weeks, I’ve been mulling over a best of blogpost for SxSW;  I attended the ending awards show and thought why don’t I try to do this better? But some of the best ofs have morphed into tweets and internet babble so I thought I’d issue another shoutout to Sx (but the 2011 version): in praise of the ZUI (zooo-ee). Remember http://2011.beercamp.com/? It was a Sx experiment a bit back, which allowed for some JS and CSS transform magic to make for a limitless dive into cool content, and its zoom functionality has been on my radar of late.

In sweeping generalities, the ZUI (Zoom User Interface) is a vector graphic environment that allows users to approach and access content in a fluid sequence of zoom and pan through a seemingly infinite internet space. I’ve captioned David DeSandro’s GitHub mockups to illustrate the type of code layering patterns it uses executed through CSS scaled transforms among other masterful flourishes. Golly it’s cool, and before I get all-gooey-(or all-GUI? too much?)-gush about how brilliant it is when the content auto-adjusts to fit the resized container objects (semantic zooming *swoon*), let me stumble through some examples…
  • ChronoZoom: I tweeted this a while ago…visually stunning
  • 3D Topiscape: Personal knowledge management, filemapping in vis.
  • Scale of the Universe: Also tweeted, shameless replug.
  • Piccolo: Historic Java/C# toolkit that now operates/updates with small-scale upkeep. Long-live piccolo.
  • Impress.js: Prezi optimized for CSS3 transforms and more modern browsers.
  • Prezi: I’ve always found the Prezi to be a particularly engaging. The swoop and zoom function has real potential to mask even unimpressive content. It’s rather immersive, like an IMAX movie v.s. a Netflix download. In fact, I just staged a GoogleFight between Prezi and ppt. and hot damn if it didn’t own Office like WHOA.

Tertiary, but maybe worthwhile is an <aside> on the application of the ZUI to mobile devices and media. The agreeable tactility of a touch interface gives the ZUI more gestural bang for its buck: pinch to shrink, spread to expand, jump on the scroll event in JS and go wild….seemless, genius, when your code doesn’t break. #notthatihavethisproblem

Fusing ZUIs with the architecture of a mobile app demands a kind of immediacy in feedback that we are increasingly demanding as users. With dialup and the rainbow spinner roll, we were forced to support delays. Now if some JS or fancy Flash takes more than 2 seconds to load, I’ll close the tab and work on one of the 4 (read: 10) other browser windows i’m paging through.   With mobile, it seems we have 0 willingness to wait. When we navigate with our fingertips, feedback must be continuous for morale to improve. HTML5 echoes back with some pretty impressive support for meh computers with fancy graphics/vid cards (AKA mobile devices!), and the kind of global visualization and manipulation capabilities of WebGL lend themselves to the propagation of the ZUI. Ultimately, adding transforms and scaling = math that I am not prepared to execute but am happy to consume. The layering is learnable though, githubable, so I’m going to pencil it in for my pockets of “fun” time in the future. For now, I’ll start brainstorming means of sustainability and preservation as art installs migrate from the gallery to the ZUI. AND what if our pinterest boards could be revisualized as networked swatch samples in a ZUI? Or our Flickr accts could be nested into piles of photographs browseable in zoom.
Oh the places we’ll go!
And thus the ZUI becomes the big-kid zoo of overstimulation in an interface where there are no “documents” “or windows” because the objects are live and mobile and moving, and we’ve this intimate scope with our antelope. Our virtual zu-scapes are immersive. and so the kind of gated interface that we’ve maintained with windows no longer keeps us from a diving (or div-ing – see caption code #shameless); in sum, we’re not prisoners of our position (outside the zoo or in). And though we’re probably not at the Command-line ->Graphical UI precipice with the GUI->ZUI gravitation, we’re pretty close to considering the technology of the ZUI as integral to our demands of daily mobility and device dependence.
Some space ZUI’s, befitting our final (?) frontier….
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Mar 30 2012
Technology

It’s a se[Man]tic ’s World

I’ve wanted to offer something of interest about the semantic web for a while now, and since I’ve finally found an appropriate bracketed pun to crown my content, I feel comfortable proceeding. In the interest of sparing you the introduction, let’s just say that semantics is about meaning, and the semantic web is about a rhizomatic meaning-machine of networked intelligence, of mapped and linked data, so let’s have a one-sided conversation about some exciting <warning – neologism> semantification </warning> of late? Glad you agree.

Partly inspired by conversations and readings I’ve been lily-pad looping through, the following mostly stems from recent realization that my technology interests revolve around applications and ideas that are as yet unsupported on a majority of platforms. Web GL and HTML5, check. RDA and RDF, check. Linked data and Crowdsourcing/funding, checkcheck. Which of these things is like the other?
[hint: I bet the semantic web knows! ]
In the interest of space saving and simplicity, I’ll distill this discussion to the basics of why semantics and structured linking speaks to our world now (and hereafter). This will partially justify my interests as relevant given some strategic link drops and (potentially) disasterous puns. As is my way, this post will be illustrated by some awesome CC google search results for semantic web acronyms, which, as of yet, are not mapped to specify my intended meaning…and instead turn back a delightful assortment of [inappropriate] but awesome.
RDA? RDA? 
Let’s begin with some library metadata for the semantic web: RDyAy!
To say a lot of librarians wish that RDA would go away, come again another day, is perhaps an understatement; while doing research on RDA’s status a few months ago, I had a hard (read: impossible) time finding people to support it. For background, Resource Description and Access (RDA) models as a metadata schema for the new millennium; it allows for multimedia cataloging and web compatibility. Controversy comes from its dependence on the semantic web, modified MARC and on better ILS, all of which are arguably in various states of undone. I constructed a simple but punchy ppt to discuss the pros/con[troversy] of RDA and  noted that that the following is upcoming:

NEW EVENT ANNOUNCED – CILIP’s RDA: Resource Description and Access Executive Briefing

Thursday 28 June 2012, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE

Following the announcement from The British Library that from 1st June 2012 MARC bibliographic files distributed by the BL will include records catalogued in accordance with RDA: Resource Description and Access, CILIP will be holding an exclusive Executive Briefing on RDA,  focusing on the issues surrounding the implementation of RDA.   

Register your interest and be the first to be notified when registration opens.

JUSTIFICATION 1: I am not the only one.

Google adding semantic relationships to search algorithm, improving its SERP and SEO capabilities through semantics.

JUSTIFICATION 2: Google is doing it, so why can’t we?

Semantic Web Challenge 2012 – Call for Participation

http://challenge.semanticweb.org/2012

Boston – USA

November 13-15, 2012

JUSTIFICATION 3: This (above) is happening, so obviously other people are into it and making projects that use it regardless of support system #notmakingthisup

Outside the riveting world of library metadata schemas, postings about our approaches to language (both traditional and digital semantics) are also populating my feeds. This brings me to a recent announcement about the life and death of our expanding lexicon, charted in the linguistic statistics of a few physicists’ research.

Aside from some of the more concrete information about our how stats and physics can process the ebb and flow of our anglophone development, perhaps the most fascinating part of the study involves its own semantic articulations: in particular the way words are considered living entities with timelines and growth potential concomitant with its human population. We give physical and human credence to expressions and this suits new application developments for a variety of interfaces.

With the semantic web, I think we are tempted to conflate the space of human and computer languages and give them a comparable organic modality as perhaps never before. In the name of optimal integration, we forget that our distinction between the natural languages of our physical world and the artificial languages of the virtual world at one point maintained exclusivity based on structure and syntax. While spoken and written languages have splintered into dialects and evolved organically depending on geographic and situational circumstance, the artificial constructs of our machine languages (here’s looking at you SQL, Java, Perl) provided for a more prescriptive structure, defined and premeditated to execute or implement a constrained set of tasks. That’s not to say that abbreves, additions and edits have not been incorporated, but there isn’t really a subtly slanged Java <aside> or for that matter a subjective C </aside> there are spinoffs and additional languages that soften or modify its structure. With the semantic web, we’re migrating toward a new territory of spectacular in meaning-making across linguistic divisions and operator/interface limitations. Describing entities and relationships semantically, we can map them and mash them in graphically innovative ways and modify them with the words that express meanings with purpose and precision.

So, what does this mean? That languages are fusing and our digital platform is melding to our analog one…that the syntax and selective meaning-making of posterity will be defined by a naturalized machine-readable language that will posture the subject-object-predicate of our triples with attention to our natural linguistic constructs as humans. With the mashup methodology in mind, I’ll point to a Radiolab video from a few months ago…related to our semantics and appropriately enunciated in wedded images:

And this sort of meaning-making will matter to everyone (not just the nerdy librarian chick demographic). Stay tuned friends, the semantic web is (and will be) integral to our wordy world.

do this:

Semantic Web Challenge 2012 – Call for Participation

http://challenge.semanticweb.org/2012Boston – USA

November 13-15, 2012

check these:

RDB2RDF Working Group

RDF Working Group

SPARQL Working Group

follow this:

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

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Mar 13 2012
Conferences

Antidisciplinary Ambient Technology: Graphical Libraries and Data Vi[ral]ization

Inspired by a rather appropriate infographic introduced in a data vis sesh at SxSW, I will amend my Woo Visualizationprevious posting to include some other trends populating presentations of the past two days. In collaboration with the Harvard Libraries, Rosten Woo of wehavenoart.net discussed his employment of a circulation history dataset from Harvard’s libraries tracking use of the collection by a color-coded system of subject-heading classifications. The graph dynamically maps use of particular subsets of the collection to track check-out rates for book subjects with cascading specificity categorized by color, all in the name of mapping collection popularity by topic. This outshows our rather unattractive CountUse manual scan function in Millenium currently in use at work. Both attractive and useful from a collection development standpoint, Woo’s project overlaps issues of datavisualization and more seemless technological integration of graphical representations, large data sets and our increasing attraction to mapping and charting information. Given its popularity throughout the conference, I thought I would discuss some of the more fascinating presentations.

Good Mag InfographicOn the art side, myriad presentations discussed graphic design and infographic impulse for journalists and media specialists across disciplinary platforms. A Sunday keynote addressed the idea of “ambient technology” and on more than one occasion, I heard authors of infographics cite “anti-disiplinary” efforts to fluidly integrate creative and coding energies and to create collaborative information designs. Coordinating a more composite relationship between human and computer processing of a dataset through graphic representations attempts to allow multiple disciplines to collaborate on providing visualizations of information. Informed by art and computer development, collaborative “antidisciplinary” information processing units are at present working together to create more useable, visible and applicable data, examples showcased in the user-friendly visualizations of Visual.ly and in this year’s Visualization Marathon sponsored by Seed and Eyebeam among others:

View the vid: http://www.visualizing.org/embedded/38142

On the tech side,  a code-heavy but creative presentation on the potential of WebGL (Web-Based Graphics Library) and Html5 to transform the representational capability and rendering of interactives echoes some of my quoting of Chrome’s Wilderness Downtown project (re: previous post), while also introducing me to additional experiments courtesy of Google (slides available here: http://bit.ly/z1PzEf). Among these, Chrome Experiments’ WebGL interactive globe enables geographic data mapping of WebGL projects that encourages users to add data and actively manipulate and move the globe in the same way that their collab Rome video popculture-izes the “movement” toward a more webGL enabled online environment like last year’s Arcade Fire video partnership. The code is pretty cool, Chrome-enabled and built on the broadly defined principles of WebGL which conflates our client-side connection to (formerly) more “inaccessible” code: creating a frictionless hardware and software already embedded in browser to permit users to interact with visual representations online and engage in 3-D rendering, rotation, and contribution to content like never before.

This aligns comfortably with the prior keynote on “ambient technology.” The idea being that the best data and code is invisible, that infoprojects have become increasingly integral to our systems such that they are no longer physical and tactile products but WebGLUniverserather interactive interfaces with a fluid and atmospheric quality. No longer in the domain of rational or Cartesian graphics to compliment our information, we have entered the realm of sensitive cohesion with our techverse (not “I think, therefore I am” but “I sense therefore I am”), with our presence codified in a personalized cartography defined by the datasets and infographs that chart and map our media output online/otherwise.

As a friend and fellow librarian once mentioned to me, we will soon be the voices of nostalgia when we recount our use of barcodes and cards for access to our account information at libraries and in life, as we witness the more progressive development of chip implants embedded with our unique IDs and access codes. And yet, the popularity of 3-D design and printing capabilities developed through Web GL and creatively customized by coders at MIT or Chrome experiments suggests that we harbor a persistent attachment to rendering these virtual developments in tactile and physical products, digitally designed but printed in 3-D. As I opened with Woo’s data visualization of CountUse data at Harvard’s libraries, I’ll close with Chrome Experiment’s graphic interactive of Google Books in an online “Bookcase” library.  Browser embedded and browseable for users, the bookcase presents a coded to cool digital collection. Along with other infographics at 2012’s SxSW, we thus witness the development of graphics libraries, and interactives that blur code and creativity in human-computer cohesive interface.

Some valuable links:

Cool Map Book connecting emotions to visualizations: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2009/06/04/emotional-cartography/

Data Vis for SxSW site: http://longlivedatavis.com/

Woo’s Graphics: http://wehavenoart.net/

Good Magazine’s Graphics: http://www.good.is/infographics

Visual.ly for visualizing your data: http://www.visual.ly

Cool stuff w/Web GL:

http://www.myrobotnation.com/ – create/build your own robot

http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/ – 3-D printed jewelry

http://www.ro.me/tech/ – Chrome Experiments Rome Video

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