serendipityoucity

I am looking at Many Eyes and some of the NYTimes multimedia interactive reporting visualizations, and well, they are producing truly wonderful stuff. What an awesome team (sigh no girls though!)!

Here are links to some of their work, each and everyone is beautiful and tell a story with data:

• Election Results
  
• Faces of the Dead
• The Election Day Word Train 
• "I Hope So Too."
• Innaugural addressess
• Republican Debate: Analyzing the Details
• A Year of Parking Tickets
• Represent
• All of Inflation’s Little Parts

Here are a few articles:

• A conversation with Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter about interactive graphics at the New York Times (jon Udell)
  
• Talk to the Newsroom: Interactive News Collaborative
• The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady
• Making sense of data at The New York Times
  
• Old Media Interview: Aron Pilhofer, interactive guru, editor at The New York Time

…i was up til really late last night going through hundreds of spreadsheets and so today the best i can do is eat red river cereal with raisins & some umeboshi for some heartburn and laugh my head off at these Gary Larson Far Side Flickr Reenactments

..you serendipitously cross a semantic ontologist who wants to do a degree in material science, with a geographer trying to understand infrastructures, a physics prof knitting socks and a scientist working on designing a 3D printer in a coffee shop…

well 4 people - 2 sets of 2 strangers - converging on the topic of circulation of elites, post modern architecture, leading to cold fusion, techno-science politics, science fiction, geek culture and knitting, consumption, and then onto a book called Rebel Sell, which looks pretty compelling and a Bruce Sterling’s story about a fabrikator.

All because the pool got closed due to a malfunctioning ventilation system, then me looking for a post office and suggesting that instead of a steam & whirlpool perhaps a chocolate brownie was in order which just so happened to be co-located near a post office!  In addition, while leaving the brownie place, and working our way home, I was informed that the new fair trade organic coffee joint got moved to a new location, and in the spirit of Saturday procrastination why not go check it out!

All to say, it was an awesome conversation with two really interesting strangers and a possible career move for my friend into the study of cold fusion and me taking a bath and having an egg sandwich for dinner before delving into quality of life indicators for the rest of the night!

That rebel sell book looks like a really really interesting study that I will have to delay looking into for a bit, but look into I will!

I always wanted to just study philosophy, but was never sure if I could afford to see a psychoanalyst while doing so, instead I look through their eyes, in this case, a film

If humans have a moral obligation not just to help but also not to harm, shouldn’t we be asking how much of what we spend goes toward aggravating global suffering? This is one of the issues a dishevelled Singer tries to explore as he walks up and down New York’s Fifth Avenue, the shopping mecca of the rich and the terminally indebted. (Not to trivialize his argument, but would it have killed him to step into Barney’s and buy a new shirt?)

Peter Singer in documentary NFB film Examined Life

From Globe articles:

• Thinking, quite deeply, on their feet
• Naomi Klein nominated for Warwick Prize

Social Tech Brewing presents: Online political campaigning Monday, Jan 26th

Obama’s election victory last November has been hailed as the coming of age for online political campaigning. In Canada we’ve seen the growing importance of online campaigning in recent elections, and in the progressive coalition movement that nearly brought down the government at the end of last year.

As we look forward to new political landscapes both in Canada and the US, what can we expect to see in the new tools and best practices in online advocacy and campaign organizing?

Join Social Tech Brewing Ottawa from 5:00 to 6:30 pm on Monday, Jan 26th (the day of Canada’s parliamentary re-boot) for a discussion about new exciting times in online politics and advocacy.

To jump-start our discussion, Pam Kapoor (Gatineau-based communications/advocacy specialist) will share some of her experiences as Press Officer and Cincinnati Regional Director with Vote Today Ohio, a key contributor to the early-voting and GOTV (get out the vote) effort that delivered a necessary win for Obama in that critical swing state.

For this event we have arranged a meeting space (with wifi and projector) at the Code Factory on 246 Queen Street, (second Floor). If you don’t already know the Code Factory, it’s Ottawa’s new co-working space/community hub for tech entrepreneurs. www.thecodefactory.ca

Ian Graham, director of the Code Factory, will be on hand to welcome Social Tech Brewing and give us some background to his vision of a collaborative new media innovation community in downtown Ottawa.

To help cover the cost of reserving the Code Factory cafe (including complimentary tea/coffee), we’re asking those who can to contribute $5 toward our use of this space. Thanks!

Questions and suggestions are always welcome: irishg@shakethepillars.com or mike@openconcept.ca.

The following is an abstract that was submitted to a Journal this week.

Title: GPS Tracings: Personal Cartographies

Tracey P. Lauriault in conversation with Jeremy Wood about his new media driven cartographic art: GPS tracings, their amalgam, and his installations.

Artist/Cartographer: Jeremy Wood, a US & UK Artist based in London England. Interviewer: Tracey P. Lauriault, Researcher, Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

Jeremy Wood, places, code and GPS are the protagonists in his personal cartographies. He plots the journeys; bicycles, boats, planes and his two feet provide him mobility; geography is the precept and these are mediated by the communication infrastructure. Land, water, air and the engineered environment of places determine the routes, are the medium within which his body moves and are the settings where he performs his traces. Time, location, and established measurement standards, along with geodetic models, radio signals, software, the language of culture and place encode the narrative voice. GPS is his cartographic rendering tool, it is what points, traces, locates and recounts. Cartography is his narrative mode, it is that which conveys his personal narrative.

This article will be derived from and mediated by telephone, skype, email and on-line chat conversations. We will discuss Jeremy’s personal cartographies, how these journeys tell him where he is, has been and potentially where he is going. These are personal cartographies, the result of individual journeys that he is in the process of assembling. His GPS tracings make us privy to his personal data, which tell us something about him while questions about science, cartography, and technology also become conspicuous. We will focus on the Data Cloud outdoor installation, the Meridians performance and the assemblage of his GPS tracings since the year 2000 into a metamap.

Jeremy’s work is playful yet it also critically foregrounds the fallacy of technological accuracy and how imprecise stories can be. Where he is and where things are positioned, are inaccurate from a GPS point of view, since GPS is engineered imprecision. This lack of specificity changes the location of things in space ever so slightly, but just enough to confound physical reality as we see in the Data Cloud outdoor installation. But alas, are stories ever definitive accounts of an experience? And what of the models by which we understand the world? What if we are between spatial models and some spaces are no where to be seen? Does that mean the place does not exist? What does it mean to be there but lost in space? What does it mean for a place to exist in the first place? His Meridians performance of the Herman Melville quote It is not down in any map: true places never are, elucidates this spacial conundrum in both literal and metaphorical terms. He traces the words along two meridians that do not meet yet these are drawn according to two different but scientifically approved mathematical models of the earth, GMT and GRS80. Ironically true places is written in Greenwich Park the very same location where time and space were established as a standard in 1884.

Our conversations will include the above and what he thinks his multiple short cartographic stories will become when assembled; what he expects to read from the metamap of those journeys; and a bit about the different software he has used overtime to help him render these personal cartographies. We will also discuss how he came to be enamoured with maps and map making.

We hope to intersperse text with illustrations of his work.

References:

Meridians was commissioned by the University of Minnesota Design Institute for ELSE/WHERE MAPPING: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories 2006, published by the Design Institute and distributed by University of Minnesota Press.

Data Cloud was commissioned by Tom Jaspers for the Checking Reality exhibition at Platform 21

Ecology Ottawa is encouraging the following:

It’s time to let city council know that we want an end to the transit strike and we want it now! So Ecology Ottawa is launching an on-line petition calling on Councilors to get the city moving again. The petition is short and to the point:

"Dear City Councillors, Enough is enough! Public transit is an essential part of a productive, healthy and environmentally sustainable city.  We need all parties to sit down at the negotiating table and produce a fair deal that will end the transit strike and get our city moving again."

Together we can send the city a strong message that Ottawans want action. We are asking you to please:

1.      Forward this message to your friends, family and co-workers in Ottawa.

2.      Go to http://www.ecologyottawa.ca/take-action/sign-on/  and sign the petition.

3.      Pick up the phone and call the Mayor (613-580-2496) and your Councillor. You can email too! (Contact info here: http://www.ottawa.ca/cityhall/mayorcouncil/councillors/index_en.html),

4.      And let them know that you want action to resolve this strike.

We’ll be sure to let City Councillors know as the number of signatures rise, and if the strike isn’t over by January 28th, we’ll march down to City hall and put them directly into your Councillors’ hands.

Please help get the city moving again.

Change is gonna come!

Esther Duflo, Chaire internationale-Savoirs contre pauvreté, Collège de France

This was a book recommended to me during my PhD Proposal defense:

Apollo’s eye : a cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination / Denis Cosgrove.

Here we go!  Now that there is an economic crisis we are suddenly hearing the word infrastructure in the media? The first wave of massive infrastructure creation was the New Deal in the 30s, now a new new deal - an Obama and Harper version, and I wonder what the real spatial articulations of those will be. Sustainable transit or the same old roads? New R&D energy investment - wind farms? More sustainable data havens?

We have been hearing about infrastructure failures, as in cables being cut, bridges and overpasses collapsing, potholes and exploding water mains, and also about how the reserves were in Iraq and could not be called upon with Katrina in New Orleans, and how New Orleans was an example of complete and utter infrastructural neglect from both a social and physical perspective.

Now we are hearing that infrastructure investment is about job creation - an economic stimulation package.  Hmmm!  I guess the war in Iraq did not make enough money for the infrastructure builders - overseas contracts!  So ya mess up the place and then bring in the boys to fix it up! And then you mess up the economy to bring in the boys to fix it up?  Are we manufacturing things to fix - as Noam would say, as opposed to thinking about the momentum of those things in the first place and whether or not we want to restructure them or even if those are the things we want - and what do they determine in how we engage with space? 

Now, in Canada we will hear about some new infrastructure/economic stimulation packages and lets see which builders/engineers get the dough to build what and how much new thinking and directions we get if any, and where will we be able to exert any influence in that direction - of these path dependent massive endeavours - that structure how we as individuals and as a group will navigate in space and how all this will mediate how we do a multitude of things!

It will be interesting to see if people - citizens - will be involved in directing these infrastructure projects.  I think it is important to remember that infrastructures are not neutral, these folks could not have said it better, infrastructures are:

“involved in sustaining what we might call sociotechnical geometries of power in very real – but often very complex – ways”¹,

which embody congealed social interests that represent

“long-term accumulations of finance, technology, know-how, and organizational and geopolitical power”²

and I think we need to be understand them in all their dispersions and be involved somehow, not just passive recipients - but how?

1Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin, 2001. Splintering Urbanism, p.11

2Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin, 2001. p.12.