Murmur

From Medialab Prado

1 Descripción del projecto / Description of the project
2 Preguntas
3 Datos / Data
4 Tecnologías / Technologies
5 Seguimiento / Current status and next steps
6 Autor/es del projecto / Author(s) of the project
7 Colaboradores / Collaborators
8 Links

Descripción del projecto / Description of the project

El proyecto propone visualizar la atención mediática del espacio urbano calle por calle. Noticias oficiales, blogs, páginas web personales y medios de comunicación temáticos serán monitoreados para generar mapas que pongan de relieve patrones de percepción de la ciudad. Este mapa conducirá a la creación de un atlas que mostrará los cambios temporales en la percepción de diferentes áreas urbanas. El atlas producirá diferentes visualizaciones dinámicas basadas en temas, fuentes y tiempo. bet on sports online

How does a Murmur come to life?

How does a Murmur come to life?

It all began in early November, in a city of huge grace.
And wondering how cool would have been
to look around through the eyes of “Media Space”,
we found in a great workshop the solution within.

“That’s the flow of the news,
the humans in the world diffuse!“,
said somebody jumping out from behind:
“Yes of course! … but where the hell this could be find?!“.

And silence in the room suddenly fell down.
Because, as you may have understood,
this somebody didn’t even figured out.
Thus we were shot forth to our desk made of wood.

But something out there was going to meet our needs.
Two simple words: RSS feeds.
We should have only searched for streets and places name,
skimming through blogs or online newspaper to please our aim.

“So let’s begin to choose the sources“, Mr. Somebody says now.
And he is right but once again he’s missing to say how.
He desperately wants to be useful, and so he goes a little chitty:
“I will collect manually a list of all the sites which talks about the city!”

Well, at the beginning it sounds fool:
how could a person work like a mule?
But actually it was the only way we figured out
so: “Thanks Somebody! It’s great, no doubt!”

After three or four days, he’s coming out a little slimmed down,
but who cares?! We’ve got a media panel ready to redraw the town!
Here it goes: people select the most influential sites,
based on what an other on-line-human writes.

But from all the media-flow that remains
can pass only the ones with RSS brains.
And last, the ultimate bounce
is only for those which “city” pronounce.

In the microscopic world of information spores
the technology allows us to suck any news cores.
Then we store: carefully handmade bottle are able
(you’d never guess how much) to contain and to label.

And then there’s a map of the street,
and the bottle of news is filling up!
We should make them meet.
How could we ever fill this gap?!

Could be a work for a mule, that’s for sure!
But no! We can’t ask Mr. to do something like before.
The engine we produced will read all the information
and will give the Murmur his own configuration.

That’s it! Now everything has started running faster
and lots of things will be implemented the days after.
Stay tuned on designdensity.org, because it’s worth to.
And this verses are to let you know: we too.

Preguntas

Describe the goal of the project in 3 sentences (which message do you want to carry? to whom?)

In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, our goals is to build a so-called media geography which intersects the media scape with the geographical representation of cities' streets querying the media geography. Through a web based tool we want to show the different perceptions each media has on the urban space. This tool allows user to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases.

What are the inspiring projects and theories; background, context, references

Network theories Complexity science Actor-network theory Costructivist paradigm van Berkel, Ben , and Caroline Bos, eds. 1998. Diagram Work: Data Mechanics for a Topological Age. In ANY - Acrchitecute New York, ed. Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos. n°23. New York: Anycorp. The map as cultural artifact that is anaexact and incomplete and consequently is a political act.

What is the short-term objective (what do you expect to finish in 2 weeks)?

Definition of the panel structure (A) Collection of media sources (A) Tool for fetching and parsing data (A) Interactive interface for data georeferencing(A) Content analyses implementation (B) Interactive interface for semantic analyses (B) Interactive interface for statistic analysis (B) Interctive interface for media panel visualization (C) A – High priority B – Medium priority C – Low priority

What is the long term objective (what posterior development do you think of)? To open to community for: improvement of database of media sources Classification of the media sources To build an historical archive

What are the data (status, where do they come from)

Starting from an official list of Spanish media we are going to classify all the sources (from on line newspaper to blogs) through the RSS feed. Then denotative categories (topic, type and scale) and connotative categories (tag and others...) will be assigned to all the data. In order to reduce the possible divergence between the tags of the news item and their actual topic we plan to perform a specific content analysis to gather more connotative (and possibly more accurate) tags.

How will you convert data into some perceptual experience - graphical algorithm (what is the information you want to get out of the data? how are the data and graphics related? what are the graphical decisions?)

Geographical projection Geographical distortion Force directed graph Traditional infovis tool

Datos / Data

- 600 (so far) different RSS sources
- www.11870.com API

Tecnologías / Technologies

Herramientas / Tools
- ActionScript 3
- PHP
- MySQL
- RSS

Código / Code

Seguimiento / Current status and next steps

Media panel setting... DONE
Database filling up... DONE
Visualisation experiments... DONE
Visualisation development... DONE
Interaction design... DONE