assignment two: Geo-narrative rational

For my second assignment for networked media production, i chose to create a geo-narrative. The narrative I have created is a contrasting visual tour of Canberra, through the past and present. I used photos from Canberra's past and recreated the shots, to give the viewer an visual idea of how Canberra has changed over the years and what features have stayed the same.

To create this, I first had to find photos taken in the past that showed of interesting aspects of Canberra, like views of the city and shots of the city center. I found what i was looking for on the National library of Australia's website, which features photos that illuminate Australia's past. But to use these photos in my narrative, i had to gain permission from the National library to recreate them. Lucky this was a fairly easy process, all i needed to do was fill out a form, that was provided online, about what i intended to use photos for and sign that i would comply with the restrictions set in place for recreating these photos. Then it was a simple thing to go into the library and talk with the photo office about the assignment and I gained permission to use the photos.

Next I had to travel around Canberra and recreate the photos, to show how Canberra's landscape has changed. Then all I had to do was use Google maps to create the Geo-narrative by uploading my new photos to Flickr and then link both these photos and the photos from the National library to location markers on my Google map and give contrasting descriptions with each photo about how Canberra has changed over the years.

The interesting thing about this type of networked media production is its potential for unlimited creative, interactive storytelling. By having the ability to link images to locations on a map with such ease, can allow media producers to give greater depth to locations. Because it's digital recreations of images, various images can be used in different ways and locations to show off different narratives. The this can also become a problem, as with such ease of reproduction, copyrights on photos may not be followed and an artists photos may be stolen with out their permission. So it is always important to respect the owners wishes, when recreating their digital content, otherwise your own work may be stolen in the same way.

Anyway i hope you enjoy my visual tour of Canberra and how it has changed over the years. ols

quick post

hi people this is just a quick post to say im a little late in doing my blogpost rational for my assignment and for all you people dying to read it and see understand my amazing assignment, you'll just have to wait another day...catchyou kids tomorrow.

it's zombie apocalypse time

Hi peoples, this week I'm again discussing the up coming assignment and like i said last week, i will fill you in on the detail. As you know from last week, i am working on the geo-narrative and i am focusing my story on a what if? The main theme is what would some people do if there was a zombie apocalypse in Canberra and how would they try to survive. It's essentially focusing on a small group of people and their action during the day of the zombie apocalypse. I'll give posting more info as the week progresses and the due date draws nears, but until then peace out boys and girls.
ols

assignment two

well since there was no lecture this week and so there was less stimulus for this post, i guess I'll talk about the coming assignment. We have been given two choices, create a datavisualisation or create a geo-narrative on google maps through photos. I've decided to do the geo-narrative, as it offers a greater creative freedom and i can explore a different story telling medium. i would tell you more about what I'm going to do, but i need something to talk about next week. Catch ya later kids. ols

datavisualisation

This weeks lecture focused on datavisualisation. Datavisualisation is all how expressing information or data in a visual format. Doing this helps to understand what the data means and can help in finding out information that would be near impossible without the visualisation.

The best data visualisations feature a depth of information, interactivity and an attractive visual scheme. These features help with understanding and allows the viewer to easily comprehend what the data is showing. A good use of colour schemes help with this, as it allows people to grasp the data's meaning instantly. For example using red, yellow and green can help when representing levels of good, medium and bad. This colour scheme's meaning is universal, as it is known because of traffic lights and through this, people can under linked meanings associated with it.

So essentially, datavisualisation's can greatly enhance a how raw data can be represented and understood.

Multiplicity and tutorial ideas

OK so yesterday's lecture was about multiplicity and reiterated the idea of collective intelligence. So in today's tute, we explored these ideas further, and were assigned into groups and were given the task of thinking up an idea for a website that utilized collective intelligence. My group had the idea of using collective intelligence to track cars around a city in real time.

The basic idea was to give every registered car a free small G.P.S tracking device. This device then would then be able to provide the cars location in real time. All the data from all the cars would then be shown on a website with a map interface, as a white dot. This would enable people to see in real time, where the all the traffic jams, road accidents and delays are. People could then use the website to plan routes and avoid traffic congestion. This would then save on time, fuel and carbon emissions.

This service data could also be utilized by governments to plan future road works and create greater traffic conditions, which would also improve on time, fuel and carbon emissions. The data would be recorded and anybody could look back on previous records to see different traffic patterns and problems.

The problems with this idea is that it would take a massive amount of server space both to host and to process the data in real time and there would be a slight privacy concern.

This idea would be completely impossible without the use of collective intelligence, as without the collective co-operation of car driver using the G.P.S tracking device, the data would never be collected or utilized.

Anyway this is the basic idea of our tute presentation. I hope this might inspire some people. ols out

collective intelligence and the cute shiny slidey stuff

Ok cool that last lecture was quite interesting, as it talked about the new generation web verses the old generation web. The greatest point of interest is collective intelligence, or the many to many model. This is opposed to the old one to many model. Are you confused? OK I'll break it down for you. In the early years of the internet, that basic idea of sites, was to provided content for the general public. The site used the one to many model, by have only a few content publishers and content controllers to provided the info that goes onto the site. But nowadays, site creators can utilize collective intelligence for the content of their site. This means the amount of data that can be provided as site content goes up astronomically (this actually depends on the amount of visitor who use the site) and all they need to do it provide a user friendly framework (or the cute shiny slidey stuff). Great examples of collective intelligence include Wikipedia, Ebay, Youtube and Facebook. So in conclusion collective intelligence, or the many to many content model, is one of the great breakthroughs of the world wide web and it has made the internet a crucial part of peoples lives. ols out