SpacePlace

[Space and Place] Research about the importance of crowds

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The Stanford Humanity Lab has a research project about crowds that sounds pretty nice.

CROWDS focuses on the rise and fall of the crowd -- particularly the revolutionary crowd -- in the Western sociopolitical imagination between 1789 and the present. Participants are broadly concerned with exploring the intersection between a number of disciplines: psychology, photography, literature, painting, cartooning, film, and history, to speak only of the foremost. In the long-term, we plan to publish a multi-authored volume on the subject of crowds, create a searchable digital archive of rare, out-of-print books and articles, and mount a large-scale exhibition tracing the history of the rise and fall of the crowd in modern art. Our preliminary research results take the form of this image-intensive web site.

The website gives more information.

Why do I blog this? One of the reason I am interested in crowds is because I see them as an indirect social cues available in the environment. People usually tend to rely on this kind of information to make decisions. Crowds is a peculiar example: a crowd has severeal meaning: something is happening, the lenght might also inform the importance of the event...

[Space and place] Space hijackers

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I recently discovered the Space Hijackers, an anarchitect group made up of smart folks who seem to hack the urban environment in various ways.

Our group is dedicated to battling the constant oppressive encroachment onto public spaces of institutions, corporations and urban planners. We oppose the way that public space is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit making space. We oppose the way that users of space are being put under increasing scrutiny and control by those who own or run it. Be this via CCTV installed to monitor us, or architectural elements designed to control our moods.We oppose the blanding out and destruction of local culture in the name of global economic progress. Newer and Bigger is not always better, it is usually both impersonal and imposing.

Through our various actions we attempt to raise awareness of issues within spaces and change how these spaces are used and percieved in the future. We intend to destroy heirarchies within spaces and claim back public ownership. Our projects act as another voice within space, and become engrained upon the places we Hijack.

Have a look at their equipment department, it's impressive. Their ideas are wonderful. My favorite is definitely the Mobile Headquarter: A Mobile command centre to control Hijacker action in the field: French fans would also check http://www.guidedurenard.org/.

[Space and place] Now it\'s about road design

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The International Herald Tribune has a piece about road design. It's about Hans Monderman, a dutch traffic engineer who advocates for virtually naked cities, "stripped of all lights, signs and road markings, but there was no division between road and sidewalk. It was, basically, a bare brick square".

He made his first nervous foray into shared space in a small village whose residents were upset at its being used as a daily thoroughfare for 6,000 speeding cars. When he took away the signs, lights and sidewalks, people drove more carefully. Within two weeks, speeds on the road had dropped by more than half. In fact, he said, there has never been a fatal accident on any of his roads. Several early studies bear out his contention that shared spaces are safer. In England, the district of Wiltshire found that removing the center line from a stretch of road reduced drivers' speed without any increase in accidents.

Of course, this is of interest since I'm into research about how people makes sens of physical space to do stuff together. The point is that the design of the streets should be based on a social model. You can find more about it here. This shared space looks like:

[Locative Media] Map Hacks has a blog

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For all the folks like me who are waiting the Mapping Hacks book by Jo Walsh and Eric Schuyler, there is a blog about it.

"GPS units are nearly everywhere, integrated into cars and even mobile phones. With this collection of mostly free techniques, you can create and share useful digital mapping services of your own. Find the best sources of public geographic data, collect your own data, and integrate that information into the maps you make. Learn to use maps in weblogs, photo galleries, interactive applications , and more."

[Space and Place] History of the traffic light invention

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Howdy! Fascinating facts about the inventionof the Traffic Light :

The world’s first traffic light came into being before the automobile was in use, and traffic consisted only of pedestrians, buggies, and wagons. Installed at an intersection in London in 1868, it was a revolving lantern with red and green signals. Red meant "stop" and green meant "caution." The lantern, illuminated by gas, was turned by means of a lever at its base so that the appropriate light faced traffic. On January 2, 1869, this crude traffic light exploded, injuring the policeman who was operating it. (...) The inventor sold the rights to his traffic signal to the General Electric Corporation for $40,000

[Space and Place] A glimpse of african architecture

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A pictural website about african architecture I found while looking for stuff about social use of space. The first snapshot depicts a Gurunsi concession that acts as a panopticon. The second and the third one shows a yoruba compound ("archetype of the iconography of form in what constitutes conceptually the phenomenal transparency: emblematic figure embedded in the plane").

[Research] A nice research blog

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I just came across the blog of Philip Jeffrey. I already read few papers by him about social behavior in virtual space but I was not aware he had a blog. It seems that he noew move (like I did) in the field of context-aware computing. Unfortunately, the blog is not update since november...

My idea is to do an ethnographic study of students use of space as a place. I could then combine this with an experiment study (p values) that test this empirically. Both studies would complement each other as I look at how people extend themselves into their environment and use technology and artefacts with the environment to perceive space as a place.

[Space and Place] RIP Medialab Europe

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The MediaLab Europe seems to be dying because its principal stakeholders - the Irish Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - have not reached agreement on a new funding model for the organisation. Here is an analysis of why it failed.

Like many interdisciplinary approaches to science, especially when art is involed, MLE's research sometimes lacked scientific rigour, it lacked good evaluation and was too far out of the context of previous research (...) MLE's overheads, that is, their expenditure on each researcher on top of the person's salary, were way over 100 percent, as you can roughly guess by counting researchers and looking at spending figures. A lot of MLE's money went into selling the research, not producing results.

[Locative Media] Pervasive and Locative Arts Network

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The programme of the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network seems pretty impressive. I think I'm gonna attend the event to meet people from this community.

Speakers include Duncan Campbell, Anne Galloway, Matthew Chalmers, Matt Adams, Bill Gaver, Eyal Weizman, Sally Jane Norman, Giles Lane, Usman Haque, Franz Wunschel, Richard Hull, Jo Walsh, Teri Rueb, Minna Tarkka, Tapio Makela, RIXC, Pete Gomes, Saul Albert, Susan Kennard, Michael Longford, Steve Benford, Drew Hemment, Ben Russell

[Locative Media] Formal location metadata in blog description area

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There has been a very relevant discussion lately in the geowanking mailing-list "about formal location metadata in blog description area". The point is that since mainstream blog service vendors haven't implemented form input fields for location, it is good enough if we just start sticking raw location information directly _into_ the english text description area of a blog post. . The idea is thus to allow location blogging

For example if you have a blog entry form like this: title : [ Grandma got run over by a reindeer ] link : [ http://www.santaclaus.com ] description: [ Ma grandma jes got run over by one of dem dern reindeers. ]

Maybe it is not unreasonable to include location right in the description in some reasonably machine extractable way:

description: [ Ma grandma jes got run over by one of dem dern reindeers { longitude 0 latitude 90 } ]

To be more specific I'd suggest only two formats: 1) Longitude and latitude

{ long:nnn.nnn lat:nnn.nnn }

2) Geocoder or gazetteer with something fairly strict format-wise so the parser doesn't have to be particularily brilliant:

{ street & cross-street, city, state or province, country }

{ place name , city, state, country }

The author (Anselm Hook) also states that:

Why is this not a stupid idea? Because machines will preserve thisinformation... it doesn't require extending the fabric of the web services. The whole goal is to enable writing aggregators that can geo-place posts - in enough volume that it becomes a business case for larger web service providers. (..) Accuracy is not necessarily the goal of this. The goal is just to provide a transport for metadata that is otherwise being stripped or disallowed by naive transmission protocols - and in part to encourage formalization so that in a year or two more blogging services would do it right.

[Locative media] Great locative media resource

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(via), a great locative media resource: dr reinhold grether's directory to mobile art and locative media.

netzwissenschaft.de is mapping the emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right.

[Space and Place] A cultural use of space

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Discussion with my adviser a bout the role of space. If you're asleep in an airplane, you wake up and you don't know where you are. Then check the light on the ground, it can depicts the urban structure/organization. If the repartition is like the picture on the right, it could be the UK; if it's messy like the picture on the left, it might be some latin area.

[Locative Media] Capture the map!

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(via), a new geo-related game:

From Germany comes this nicely-done game that pits you against the computer or another human, as you each try to take over the world by doing Google queries that turn up documents localized in various parts of the world. The game uses netgeo [1] which finds the geographic location of the IP address of the page. -- http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003534.html
1: http://www.caida.org/tools/utilities/netgeo/