Adam Greenfield has redesigned V-2.org, making one of the most well-considered sites writing about technology, humans and cities even more elegant, and very, very usable. Permalinks, at last!
He’s written, as have Steve Bowbrick and Kevin Werbach, about the recently produced map of Manhattan’s wireless access points. His post is entitled ‘The digital divide made visible’ points out as Steve also has, the naked truth of access to technology, laid bare through visualisation.
Two things:
- With reference to the project I’m working on: he power of visualisation to inspire social/political thought; and the attendent dangers: “lies, damn lies and sexy-info-visualisations” if you like. Aside from Tufte (I guess?) anyone got any pointers/research for me around computer visualisation and politics?
- Bobby Womack’s ‘Across 110th Street’ is now lodged in my brain:
“Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind,
I knew there was a better way of life that I was just
trying to find.
You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under
pressure,
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester.”
Petafloptimism 
Thanks for the linkback. The URL you’re using looks broken, though. Should be: http://www.bowblog.com/archives/000063.html
s :->
Thanks for the linkback. The URL you’re using looks broken, though. Should be: http://www.bowblog.com/archives/000063.html
s :->
http://art.colorado.edu
The issues this site focuses on are not so much *political* as *public*. Yeah, it’s about digital artspace, but the implications are much wider, I think, since they are seeking to “reinvent” art education, and the nature of the medium they have chosen (the internet) makes that public, which could be seen as political. I dunno, though — it depends if whether consider the public political (and vice-versa) or not.
From their introduction:
“TECHNE breaks away from the “individual artist as genius” model generally associated with art and creative writing programs and focuses more on practice-based research and development skills that are more easily transferred to the rapidly transforming job market in both the high-tech industry and academia. Whereas TECHNE is not a graphic design factory that spews out scores of entry level computer design workers as a way to meet industry needs, the initiative does recognize that technically-proficient students with exceptional creative talent and critical decision making skills are likely to be more competitive once they graduate from our program”
Check out the Net Theory microsite especially, and the other sites that Mark Amerika has made.
Matt –
Soooo gratified that someone picked up on the Bobby Womack ref. Who would we ever be clever for, if not our clever readers?
Best,
A.
Non-issue.nl is an election issue tracker that monitors the resonance of individual party platform issues across leading print newspapers and across stable new media source sets, comprising NGOs and industry. The purpose of non-issue.nl is to identify and chart the changing media attention over time of party issues as well as party non-issues according to the new and old media source sets. In the project, one measures the extent of the currency of party platform issues in traditional and non-tradition issue-making entities, straightforwardly, through frequency of mentionings of the issue terms over time.
Issues are taken directly from party platforms, and their relative mass media currency is derived from newspaper analysis. To ascertain the non-issues and their currency, the non-traditional issue-makers are queried for issues not taken up in the party platforms. The currency of these non-issues is charted in the same way as the currency of the issues, by querying the newspapers, and counting frequencies of mentionings.
In all, one watches the changes in the currency of the party issues according to the conventional as well as to the non-conventional sources. One also monitors the currency of the non-issues in conventional media (the newspapers). Eventually, the information streams may be utilised to note the dynamics between (old and new) media and party issue formations (issue policy), and the media conditions under which any changes are made to party issue lists.
http://www.govcom.org/non_issue.ht