Data Culture
Description
Week 9: October 15 – 21
In our study of data visualization and social media, we ask the question: what is the meaning of the data? How do we interpret it? What does it reveal about contemporary life in an increasingly digital culture? With over a billion participants around the world using social media, what can we glean from this activity in the cloud about social relationships, events, social upheaval, and other patterns of human behavior. This is the precisely the subject of the work of Lev Manovich, a leading theorist in the study of data visualization and its interpretation. Manovich has created a study he calls “cultural analytics,” which looks at large sets of social media data as a means of better understanding our changing culture through new media. We will look at three of his recent works which reveal ways in which social media has altered our sense of who we are in the world.
Assignments
Due: October 26 & 29
Micro-project VIII: Internet Bridge | 互聯網大橋 (due October 26, 10:00 AM)
Internet Bridge | 互聯網大橋: In the age of the Internet, artistic collaboration is increasingly becoming a collective activity that bridges artists, cultures, language and geography. The Internet Bridge project invites students from the School of Art, Design & Media at NTU to collaborate with students from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA) to create a multimedia communications collaboration that explores historical, temporal, geographic and cultural similarities, differences, and resonances between Singapore and China. See Project Assignment for more information.
Project Hyperessay III: Technical Realization (due October 29)
Post a technical realization with any sketches, drawings, photographs you have done, which help articulate the technical elements of the work, as well as any specific software and/or hardware that is required for the project. Bring any materials and be prepared to discuss during our individual session the week of October 19th. See Project Hyperessay for more information.
Outline
Internet Bridge | 互聯網大橋
A collaborative project with students from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA) in Tianjin, China.
Internet Bridge | 互聯網大橋: In the age of the Internet, artistic collaboration is increasingly becoming a collective activity that bridges artists, cultures, language and geography. The Internet Bridge project invites students from the School of Art, Design & Media at NTU to collaborate with students from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA) to create a multimedia communications collaboration that explores historical, temporal, geographic and cultural similarities, differences, and resonances between Singapore and China.
Here is the information for Micro-project VIII: Internet Bridge | 互聯網大橋
Project Hyperessays #2: The Role of the Viewer
Presentations/discussion of the Project Hyperessays, discussing the role of the viewer and the implications for interaction, viewer-participation, and user-generated content.
We will then talk about ideas for the final exhibition. Note I have updated the Final Project description in Project Assignments under Presentation.
Lev Manovich
Lev Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which was described as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” Manovich is a Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative that works on the analysis and visualization of big cultural data. In 2013 he appeared on the List of 25 People Shaping the Future of Design.
Reading
Painting With Data: A Conversation with Lev Manovich by Randall Packer
Questions for discussion:
- Do you think the analysis of social media can give us insight into society, social interactions via the Net, issues of identity, privacy, the virtual, history, culture, etc? Is social media an accurate portrait of contemporary life?
- What does Lev Manovich mean by “expressive visualization,” how can visualization have expression in its form and content?
- What does Manovich mean by leaving traces on social networks through our data? Does this have to do with privacy or our virtual identity?
- How is Manovich’s work like a film? How does narrative result from data visualization?
- How does Manovich think about patterns as narrative?
- What are the implications and dangers of the data visualization of social media in terms of the issues of privacy and big data?
- Is data objective? Is it truthful? Is it accurate? What ultimately does it tell us?
Works for Review
Phototrails (2013)
“How do we explore social media’s visual data which contains billions of photographs shared by hundreds of millions of contributors? What types of insights can we gain from analyzing this massive visual universe? Phototrails is a research project that uses media visualization techniques for exploring visual patterns, dynamics and structures in user-generated photos.
Using APIs provided by popular media sharing services, we crawled millions of publicly shared photos and their metadata. We analyze every image and then visualize groups of images together using our software tools.”
Questions for review:
- What do urban “visual signatures” tell us about a city? From example in Instagram Cities, what do 50,000 images from San Francisco organized by hue and brightness tell us?
- What about a power outage over a 24 hour period during Hurricane Sandy in Brooklyn New York, from Instagram Cities?
- How might we compare the montage works to film montage? What kind of narrative emerges?
- How do the aesthetic and scientific aspects of the visualizations interact with one another?
SelfieCity (2014)
“Investigating the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world. Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods: We present our findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions. Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns. The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos. Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.”
Questions for review:
- Looking at the imageplots in SelfieCity, what are the differences/similarities of selfies taken in different cities and different cultures. For example, what about the smile plots, and what does this reveal about the various cities/cultures?
- What about the selfieexploratory, in its analysis of eyes, mouths, glasses, gender, head tilt, etc., what do these analytics tell us about the various cultures?
- In your opinion, how does the selfie fit into the history of hobbyist photography as a form of self-portraiture?
The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev (2014)
The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev is the first project to analyze the use of Instagram during a social upheaval. Using computational and data visualization techniques, we explore 13,208 Instagram images shared by 6,165 people in the central area of Kiev during 2014 Ukrainian revolution (February 17 – February 22, 2014). Over a few days in February 2014, a revolution took place in Kiev, Ukraine. How was this exceptional event reflected on Instagram? What can visual social media tell us about the experiences of people during social upheavals?
Questions for review:
- How do the Instagram photos function as a form of citizen journalism, or do they?
- What do the photos tell us about times of crisis and social upheaval, what about social media in general?
- How do we work with social media data in a visualization project when “everyday” images exist side by side with what Manovich refers to as the “exceptional?” What does the juxtaposition tell us?
Data Visualization Workshop
Juan will lead us in a data visualization workshop to investigate methodologies for cleaning and preparing data, critical for effective use of visualization.
Individual Final Project meetings
Since we do not have class next week (Wednesday, October 22nd), I would like to setup individual 30 minute meetings with everyone to discuss your final projects. We will schedule the sessions to meet at my office in ADM 4-13. (I return to Singapore this weekend)
Upcoming Assignments
Internet Bridge (October 26th)
Project Hyperessay 3: Technical Realization (October 29th)
Readings
DIKW Hierarchy
Word of advice: This is by no means an exhaustive description of the process of data visualization, also, be cautious of accepting these ideas as “true” to every data project.
DIKW stands for Data, Information, Knowledge, & Wisdom and provides a good overview of the different stages that a data project might go through.
Today we are going to discuss briefly the first arrow of the chart above: “Gathering & Filtering – First level of encoding”.
Resources
Tutorials
“The Programming Historian is an online, open access, peer reviewed suite of about 30 tutorials that help humanists (though slanted towards historians) learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research. Despite the name, we do not focus exclusively on programming, but rather aim to provide guidance on a variety of digital methods and approaches.”
API’s
The Programmable Web is an online resource concentrated on providing information about available API’s. Take a look at their directory and learn what databases you can extract data from. The ability to search “by category” is particularly powerful.
This one will let you test the API and provides the code you would need in different programming languages.
Tools
Open Refine is a powerful application (FREE, works both on PC and Mac) for data manipulation. Especially if you have very large datasets.
There is a tutorial at the programming historian site: Cleaning Data with Open Refine
You can use this application within your google account (Google Drive). “Fusion Tables is an experimental data visualization web application to gather, visualize, and share data tables.”
JSON is a very common format for transmitting data over the web. Many of the API’s will deliver the data to you in JSON format. This online tool will help you study and process the data.
Data
A small snapshot of random twitter data captured through the Twitter Streaming API.
Browsing through the public API’s I found a few that reminded me of some of your projects.