Theoreti.ca

I just found that someone has posted on YouTube the introduction to the movie Stranger than Fiction where, with Emma Thomson’s voice narrating, we see Will Farrell’s accountant character’s life surveyed with an overlay of explanatory graphics. I’m not sure what to call the graphics – they sometimes look like a visualization of what Crick (the character) thinks about as he walks and counts. They sometimes seem to document aspects of Crick’s life, like how many items he puts in the dishwasher each night or how he ties his tie. They behave like augmented reality information graphics meant to add information for the viewer, but information that has the character of the character.

According to information aesthetics the infographics were developed by the MK12 Tactical Design and Research Bureau. Now if life had an interface, I’d like it to be stranger than fiction.

Christian V. pointed me to a New York Times story on Is This the Future of the Digital Book? (Brad Stone, April 4, 2009).

Wattpad, based in Toronto, is among several start-ups soliciting the work of unpublished authors, giving them a route around the big book companies and then distributing their writing on the Web and on mobile phones. Wattpad draws its revenue from advertising and, for now at least, does not pay the authors.

Smart phones now have larger and brighter screens so it is possible people will use them to read, but I’m not yet convinced. Will weaving multimedia into the book save it?

Calen H. sent me a link to a very funny YouTube video on Opera Face Gestures. The idea is to control the Opera browser by making faces. Almost good enough to be implemented.

Congratulations to Ray Siemens and company for INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments which got funding as a Major Collaborative Research Initiative from SSHRC. I’m part of the Interface Design group led by Stan Ruecker.

The Taco Lab who are probably best known for the Siftables (small cookie-sized tile computes that sense each other) shown at TED have a blog with some interesting posts like this one on American Shanzhai?. Shanzai literally means “mountain fortress” or the hideout of bandits and it refers to pirate activities like hacking cheap copies of consumer goods (that are heavily marked up.) It is now beginning to refer to a creative subculture of improving or altering electronics outside state (and IP) control. Thus the image above is from the Taco Lab blog and is a example of this creative shanzai – in this case a cell-phone/cigarette pack whose value is in its uniqueness. This got me thinking of all the open projects out there that make it easier to hack things like:

• TuxPhone – a project to develop open hardware and software for a cell phone.
• Arduino – an open electronics prototyping platform that’s great for interactive art projects
• LilyPad Arduino – an open device that is light enough for wearables and e-textile projects
• William Turkel’s Fabrication Lab – a unique (to my knowledge) humanities lab

Webilus.com :: le meilleur des images du web is a French web site that gathers images and visualizations of the web and computing culture. The image above, for example, compares e-mail collaboration to wiki collaboration showing how much more work it is to use e-mail.

The site is a blog curated by Frédéric COZIC and it has a widget you can install to see the most recent images on your blog.

The Pool is a project from the University of Maine new media group, Still Water who also developed ThoughtMesh. It is a collaboration between faculty and students that provides a visual space where ideas can be described (intent), approached and released. (The metaphor is fishing and releasing.) It encourages sharing, rating, and redevelopment of ideas. The have pools for code and art.

The Pool offers a very different message. This online environment is an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. (learn more -> purpose)

The Chronicle of Higher Education in New-Media Scholars’ Place in ‘the Pool’ Could Lead to Tenure (Andrea L. Foster, May 30, 2008, Volume 54, Issue 38, Page A10) discusses The Pool as an alternative form of peer review for getting tenure, which rather misses the point for me. What impresses me about this is the collaboration between students and faculty in experimentation around structured collaboration. The Pool could dry up, and some of the code pools seem rather poorly stocked, but that wouldn’t detract from what seems like thoughtful and sustained experimentation with social collaboration. The wiki, Flickr, Facebook and blog models of Web 2.0 social knowledge dominate our thinking about what is possible. The Pool reminds me that we don’t have to adapt successful models, there is room for new ideas. Catch this and release it.

TouchGraph now has a Facebook Plugin that lets you visualize your friends and their location. Its an interesting example of what can be done with visualization of people and relationships.

Ever wondered what it was like to stand in the Roman forum back in 320 CE? Well, growing up in Rome and being dragged through the now hot and dusty forum I have wondered what it was like back then amny times. Now I can fly around imperial Rome thanks to a collaboration between the Rome Reborn project led by Bernie Frischer at Virginia and Google Earth. You can download the latest Google Earth viewer and relevant layers at Google Earth Rome. All that is missing is people.

This project has recieved a lot of press like the BBC story, Google Earth revives ancient Rome. I first noticed it on the Italian Google News where it made the Top Stories front page yesterday (called Prima Pagina in the Italian.) The mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno even blogged it on the Google blog inviting people to tour.

The idea that virtual technologies now let people experience the city that I guide as it appeared in 320 A.D. fills me with pride — a pride that I inherited from Rome’s glorious past.

As a humorous aside, there is an interesting view to be had if you go through the “floor” of ancient Rome. Then you see the satellite view of modern Rome (flattened) below the ancient 3D model in an interesting inversion of the archaeological layers.

Here you see the distinctive design of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio beneath the model. The lines are the flags for items of interest that you can click on to get descriptions of the buildings.

The World of Dante is a totally renovated site from the University of Virginia (IATH) on Dante. It has some neat features. They use an image by Domenico di Michelino of Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy as a visual introduction to the site. You roll over the parts of the image and get an introduction to the project. The project also has a lot of media, including music that was commissioned to connect to references in the text to music. I heard some of this music at the New Horizons conference. This is a gem of a project even if sometimes paging the texts is slow – I’m told that it has to do with caching – just be patient.