The Cityscape as a Spectacle

Mirablau at the bottom of Tibidabo offers a spectacular view over Barcelona. At sunset, the lights are soften to contemplate the change of colors of the city.

Why do I blog this: Working on a text on data cities and visualization. I communicate my work with visualization to play with this fascination of the macro views on city dynamics. Most cities offer their observation decks, being it natural or man made. They complement the citizens mundane micro observations of atomic level city dynamics (e.g. planes, road traffic, construction sites, …)

Talk at Lift@Home in Geneva

Yesterday, I delivered my last formal talk of the year at the Lift @ home session on “Urban informatics / Les nouveaux paysages numériques“, organized by Nicolas Nova in the Lift Conference premises in Geneva. This event was part of the urban informatics workshop series Nicolas and have been running. I played the role of the utilitarian to engage the audience on the potentials benefits of exploiting the logs of digital activities in our contemporary cities. My established spiel was enhanced with some insights from a recent study of crowd dynamics at the Puerta del Angel/Rambla area in Barcelona. As usual, the slides of “L’analyse urbaine à partir des activités numériques” are online for your downloading pleasure.

It was a pleasure to finally tag team with Boris Beaude from EPFL who brought his geographer’s reading of the notion of digital spaces and the maps they entail (read “Internet, un lieu du Monde” in the book L’invention du Monde, and see his courses at SciencePo Enjeux politiques de la géographie and Théorie de l’espace at EPFL). His insights help raise the kind of reflexive awareness need to reduce the effect of map designers’ personality/background on what is finally produced (see his recent paper Crime Mapping, ou le réductionnisme bien intentionné). He delivered a compelling argument on the reductionism of crime maps visualizations, highlighting the classic misleading error of calculating the density of a phenomena from the density of residents. Furthermore, these representation rely on citizen’s declarations, while it is well known that the most dangerous areas of a city are where there is a fear to report crimes. Among other issues, this calls the attention on the lack of critical thinking on “what does this information informs us on?” and who is responsible for the mishandling and misrepresentation of the data?

Boris Beaude at the improvised cabaret in the Lift Conference premises

The third speaker, Pascal Wattiaux discussed the role of technologies in the production of the olympic games. Each of the project run for at least 10 years, with each candidacy strongly embedded into the city planning, compressing 30 of development into roughly 7 years with no escape and a constant acceleration and organizational ramp-up (growing from 350 to 150.000 people in a few years). The games experience goes from the preparation of the games, through the production of the games, and the legacy of the games. It must be in sync with the expectation of the various stakeholders (public, athletes, workforce, sponsors, municipal, regional and state governments, etc).

In that unique context, technologies constantly offer opportunities in both revenue opportunities and cost savings. However, with the constant evolutions of technologies, it is hard to build “best practices”, therefore organizers report on “best experiences”.

Nowadays there are opportunities in the analysis of the spatial dynamics of the organization, could improve the spectators management (the stadium need to be full, it is a question of image), reduce the staff of volunteers, or organize the emergency operations with specific language competences.

Analysis of Visitors from their Digital Activities

Last week I was at Donosti-San Sebastian, to give a short presentation of my research at the The First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism. In the session, “New Instruments for Measuring and Modelling Tourism Flows”, I delivered my classic spiel “Analysis of Visitors from their Digital Activities” that covered:

1. the ability to reveal aspects of visitors experience of a city/region from their digital activities
2. the opportunities to evaluate urban strategies

I have added some notes and references to augment my slides.

Prior to my talk, Carlos Arce provided a complete scan on the new instruments and techniques to measure travel behaviors, mentioning the battles in persuading people and organizations to participate to survey and the necessity to “sell better” the value of these kind of analysis (impact, opportunity and efficiency; for special need population or special areas (eco-tourism)).

Following the other presentations, it seems there are not many innovations that can surpass the power of paper+pencil to measure travel behaviors. Back in the Simpliquity days, we inspired from this traditional technique to develop a very simple technological solution for Detecting air travel to survey passengers on a worldwide scale. This approach contrasted with the quest for perfect data some statisticians seem to lose themselves in, some requesting a mandatory Galileo reporting system for each vehicle in function in the EU. I mean, Europe can be more creative than that! Fortunately, some statisticians do not seem well-armed with a consistent argumentation to get what they do not have, considering the barrier they already face (privacy, propriety, silos, data quality, evaluation of their models). I particularly expected to experience more discussions on the transformation of measures and analysis into politics and strategies (and their evaluations).

Last week, Nicolas was also invited in a keynote address to discuss the near future of tourism services based on digital traces.

Señor!

Thanks to CICtourGUNE and particularly to Ibon for the invitation!

It seems our work has inspired others very recently: Explorando otras fuentes de datos: Flickr y el turismo and Redes sociales y turismo: flickr + Canarias.

In The Making/Creating/Building Phase

This blog is now a 6.5 years ‘note to self‘, and will continue so. It contributed to help me frame and polish my thoughts on my research, and will continue so.

Now, A PhD behind me, and Lift lab in front of me, I have paved my next steps, communicating the results of my research and forging new non-academic alliances, to the detriment of contributing blog. Now that my “voice” related to the contributions of my thesis needs a renewal, I am back to a Making/Creating/Building phase (see The Kind of Research I am). I am spending a good share of my time, slightly away from this blog, developing processes and tools to qualify, measure, find utility and extract value from captured urban dynamics. It means moving beyond the fascination around basic capacities to sense or visualize a city in real-time. It means, being humble, working on the ground, understanding clients and partners, their practices and how new tools and techniques can integrate their traditional processes. It means confronting and plotting with bounded disciplines or as Julian Bleecker would say:

“Let things get rather undisciplined and a bit unruly. Disciplines are self-satisfied, with is akin to apathy, which never solved any problems.”

Back to the Making/Creating/Building Phase, contributing on two levels: 1) software/process modeling (making/creating/building); 2) talk planning (polishing a discourse)

Talk at La Terre Vue du Web

As part of a conference-debate on “La Terre Vue du Web” organized by Joaquín Keller and Christel Sorin, I gave a talk entitled “Pratiques des nouveaux espaces numériques” (slides in French) to present and debate on the emerging presence of geoinformation, often issued from the Web (expended definition of the Web that includes web protocols and Web of Things) and their implications on contemporary practices in the city. Based on a previous talk, I highlighted the ability to perform a new type of urbanism, based on evidences, merging traditional survey techniques that observes and counts the visible with now developed web analytics tools that measure activities online. This “evidence-based urbanism” provides new means to evaluate and improve strategies, exemplified by our analysis of the digital activity at the New York City waterfront as indicator of urban attractiveness (see study of the New York City Waterfalls).

New practices: merging techniques and tools to observe and measure the urban and the web, the visible and the invisible.

On the other hand, the digital representation of the physical is imperfect and potentially misleading. For instance, satnav system augment our wayfinding capacities with instantaneous contextual and planning information. Taxi drivers must assess and learn their fluctuating quality that must be assessed, leading to an evolution of their practice, sometimes amputating the capacity to learn directly from customers advices.

Evolving practices: assessing the quality of the geoinformation

The debate covered several aspects around the capacity to manipulate previously inaccessible datasets (see From Shoeboxes to Digital Footprints and Digital Shadows, Citizens to Improve Bicing, …), their ability to represent/disform the truth, the use of “sexy” visualizations as part of a research process (see Below the Tip of the Urban Data Iceberg), and their integration into current practices (see Why Real-Time Data Are Not Used to Improve Urban Systems?)

Thanks to Joaquín Keller and Christel Sorin for the invitation!

Contiguous Domains, Languages and Perspectives

This week, I head to Paris for a gig at La Cantine on the theme “La Terre vue du Web“. I will team-up with Denise Pumain to discuss the ways information, communication and location-aware technologies change our relation with the space. This event is part of a conference series on interdisciplinary approaches to the Web.

Later this month, Lift lab will run a workshop in Barcelona “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” that aims at exploring the implications and opportunities of the presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona. The list of participants is already utterly promising.

Finally, I will mingle with tourism professionals and experts at the First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism in San Sebastian, presenting new instruments for measuring and modelling tourism flows and other types of innovation in the tourism enterprise. After the 9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics at OECD, I am thrilled to once again participate to a conference sponsored by the UNWTO with practitioners and people who perform studies on the field.

Back on the road again

Why do I blog this: Thriving from the rich diversity of contiguous domains, languages and perspectives.

At the My Map is Not Your Map Workshop

Today I participated to the My Map is Not Your Map Workshop at Arteleku in hype and laid-back San Sebastian. The workshop gathers an enriching mix of artists, designers, academics, engineers. My 45min talk “New maps and practices of hybrid spaces” aimed at describing the new types of maps of hybrid spaces, their utility and their integration into practices from tourism and urban studies to the wayfinding practice of taxi drivers. Comparing to traditional maps, I stressed the increasing value of the 4th dimension (time) in the dynamic and interactive representation of hybrid spaces now available, taking the occasion to provoke the audience with the notions of “real-time awareness” and “end of the ephemeral”. Indeed, not only these new maps alter our immediate apprehensions of the space we feel, live and work in, they also serve as means to communicate evidences and measurements, critical to evaluate space management strategies and policies. These approaches could alter the practices that relate to physical character of the world and human activities. However, part of the evolution of these new practices, we should consider their implications in forms of trade-offs and amputations.

The audience reacted to the notion of “imperfect mirror to reality” (information granularity, spatial uncertainty, seamful design), I believe capturing quite well the limitations of the kind of work I develop. I like to use these practical aspects, around the notion of oligopticon to balance any rhetoric that portrays the “perfect surveillance system”.

Thanks to José Luis Pajares for the invitation!

Talk at Arteleku

In the talk “Considerations on the recorded, quantified, communicated and apprised self” given at the workshop Information Kinetics: Egoviz, I present my experiences in working with the increasing amount of stored (and circulating) information about people, and their local environments. I intended to draw a few considerations to provoke and encourage the participants who have been developing some pretty exciting projects that explored the visualisation of the relationship between the individual and the environment. With a few examples, I highlighted the fact that current visualizations are used to engage the discussions rather than solving issues. Going beyond revealing the invisible is the next step that must include imperfection as an ingredient embedded in the solution. This imperfect mirror to reality challenges the rhetoric that describes the development of information kinetics as element of an emerging panopticon. Instead, I discussed the notion of the oligopticons that are “partially intelligent, temporarily competent and locally complete. The slides with notes are online.

Engaged with the near future of egooviz at Arteleku

Why do I blog this: It is always extremely stimulating to confront my work in an art center. I was particularly surprised by the maturity of the rhetoric participants use to describe their work. Some non-technologists now master Processing and its capabilities. Those are tangible signs of the emergence of groups of data scientists/artists with multidisciplinary practises and overlapping roles. Thanks to Kepa for the inviation!

"Not So" Volunteered Geographic Information

Last week, a bad flu prevented me from attending the International Citizen Cartography meeting and presenting some of my latest work. With the presence of many people involved in activist mapping and DYI geopolitics projects, I had planned to start from Michael Goodchild’s notion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on the emergence of geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals, to discuss the greater presence of unvoluntarily generated geographic data. In the talk “Not So Volunteered Geographic Information“, I present my method to analysis these new kinds of citizen generated data, and use my work to discuss the induced opportunities, limitations and concerns. Since, I could not present on stage, I have intended to fill out the slides with extensive notes (slides with notes).

A process to generate value from digital footprints

Thanks to Pablo de Soto for his invitation.

Why do I blog this: In this talk, I intend to link the work produced in my PhD thesis with my current endeavors at Lift lab.

EgoViz and Citizen Cartography

In the past I have greatly enjoyed attending and tutoring workshops that follow the process of “data collection->observations->indicators->information visualization” over a week or two (see La Ciudad Hibrida and Visualizar). This Summer will lead me to the Citizen Cartography meeting at Laboral in Gijon and the Information Kinetics: EgoViz workshop at Arteleku in San Sebastian. Both offer a rather open format that mixes of people to feed curiosity, learn new skills, confront ideas and stimulate creativity. The call for projects at EgoViz is open until July 26, 2009:

The objective of this workshop is to connect scientific vision with artistic expression via the visualisation of data. In present-day society we live with an overabundance of information. However, obtaining meaningful analysis or relevant reflection can be an especially hard task. Organising information, offering different perspectives, encouraging analysis or bringing that which seemed hidden to light, with the aim of catalysing meaningful reflection are tasks often faced by the artist, at times in the guise of a private investigator and at others armed only with intuition. It seems appropriate, therefore, to provide conceptual and technical tools that enable the artist to tackle their investigations from other perspectives.

Relation to my thesis: A couple of summer gigs to ease up in the PhD postpartum period.