It feels great to be back in a diverse and cosmopolitan city. Walking the streets, flaneuring, drifting, getting lost in the crowd, are always re-energizing. Like a boost of freedom and power. Although this time I couldn’t walk walk Chicago that much due to my participation in the DML conference. I did have enough time…
I just assisted a great panel at SXSWi that discussed the inequalities of Geo-Data on the internet. This is something we sometimes overlook when we talk about geographic information on the web. There is a lot of user-generated data that is being produced daily automatically and purposefully and attached to different kinds of content. What…
It was interesting to learn about the participatory project that Manabe developed for the Japanese pop band Perfume. The global scope of this project and as well the difficulty of the challenge reveals that participatory culture can also thrive as when the barriers of entry are high.
Yesterday, as part of the UT-Explore open house, we run two 4o minute workshops for children and teens at the Belo Center for New Media. It was a very fast video game prototyping exercise that kids enjoyed a lot. This activity was a mini-version of some of the activities we designed and implemented last summer…
Some weeks ago I wrote an entry in this blog about the aesthetic quality of GPS traces and shared a couple of expressive GPS drawings I found at OpenStreetMap. As I explained, the GPS traces shared by the OpenStreetMap community are not explicitly drawings, but they can certainly be appreciated as such. However, searching the…
At the Digital Edge, the research group I have been working for the past 20 months, we have been studying the digital media and learning practices of young people. After one year of ethnographic work in a low-income minority majority high-school we have have been analyzing the immense amount of data composed of several in-depth…
The possibility of recording movements in space is something that has attracted me since I was a kid. I loved to draw maps of my journeys and document the path that I followed when exploring a mountain or a park. Those drawings were useful not only to complement stories and illustrate anecdotes, but also to…