The Guardian have a started weekly series on walking in the city. The first instalment was Tokyo. The second is an audio slideshow of New York. As I’ve just finished Rebecca Solnit’s classic Wanderlust: A History of Walking it seemed apt to post links to it. The video above is an extract from Michael de Certeau’s much referenced book The Practice of Everyday Life, from the chapter ‘Walking in the City’. Another famous writer of a specific kind of walking was Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist movement and inventor of the concept of the dérive or ‘drift’. These unplanned, experimental walks were meant to re-envisage the urban environment for the participant, and was a way of resisting against the formalisation of the modern city by urban planners and architects. An early article on The Theory of the Dérive (1958) is available here. Tim Ingold has also written extensively on the cultural dimensions of walking. ‘Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet’ is a particularly interesting account, and is free to download from the Journal of Material Culture, here.
Tag: The Semaphore Line
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Big Data Problems
Like I mentioned in a post a few months back, there are a few problems with mining Twitter for locational data. Partly, the problems are due to a less than representative sample size. Related to this is an article on Wired today on big data and the ‘death’ of theory. Mark Graham, who is actually part of the floatingsheep collective, has this to say in it:
“I do get why people think that ‘big data’ will mean the end of theory, because you can now answer almost any conceivable question with large data sets and transactional data shadows, but irrespective of how big or complete our datasets are, they will always be selective and partial. We’re talking about a classic ‘if you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail’ issue here.”
Or in other words, in reference to the original floatingsheep map I commented on, and from the same Wired article:
not everyone tweets, and not everyone who tweets geotags their tweets. Even with the…contextual geotagging of tweets, that still leaves a sample of tweeters that isn’t absolutely everyone. It’s still a sample of “people with the capability and urge to tweet”.
And so the issue of a small, unrepresentative sample size remains. Not quite the takeover of big data just yet.
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Streetview Exhibition
An exhibition by Skyliner based on Google’s Street View. For city-lovers, map-makers and fans of architecture of Greater Manchester. Plus a secondary exhibition documenting the demolition of the former BBC building.
The exhibition is at 2022 on Dale Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The opening is tonight from 6pm with music from 8.30pm. Skyliner is a blog on the architectural history of Greater Manchester, and it’s well worth taking a look at. Posts on the Cromford Court apartments above the Arndale Centre, the stunning Albert Hall on Peter Street and the former Lewis’s department store on Market Street are particularly worth reading. Some fantastic photos of all of them too.
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Digital rituals – was alerted to this by Alex Gekker. Great stuff.
Project completed! Here’s the Curious Rituals book (PDF, 20Mb). It describes the gestures and postures we observed, introduced by an insightful essay by Dan Hill and followed by a design fiction by Julian Bleecker and the script of the film we produced.
We’re currently testing the book printing on lulu. Stay tuned.
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Audio link to Christian Nold’s new project from back in October 2012.
What is being being mapped and to what ends? – CHRISTIAN NOLD
21 September 2012Abstract:
The presentation discusses Christian’s PhD case study which involves a process of following an engineering focused, noise mapping project funded by the EU. The case study is used to identify the entanglement between subjective experience & devices and power which are at the heart of mapping. The case study highlights a conflict between the experiences of local resident with noise pollution versus the institutional aspirations of mapping protocols. The details of the project expose fundamental ontological and epistemological conflicts about what is being mapped and to what ends. In the project this conflict can be traced backwards from the tools created for the project all the way back to the agenda of the EU research project. The aim of this talk is to provide a real-world example of the role of subjectivity as a…View original post 119 more words
Sam Hind 