OSM in Action. During the six years of history, the OSM project has been able to grow thanks to the volunteer work of an active community of amateur mappers and developers. Although this community is geographically dispersed around the world, it has organized itself in several localized projects. In the OSM wiki it is possible…
Meeting at the Crossroads Maps are a form of media that display geographic information and spatial data. They are graphic statements that carry a message about the locations they represent and the authors who made them. Maps empower people with geographic knowledge. In the history of empires, nations, and cities, maps have been used in…
In July of 2004, Steve Coast, a 24-year-old British computer scientist and entrepreneur, started OpenStreetMap (OSM) with the objective of creating a free editable map of the world. Tired of the problems data proprietary companies generate by the restricting geographical information (In the UK, as in other European countries, geographic information is very expensive and…
On January 12 2010, after the catastrophic earthquake (magnitude 7.0 Mw) near Port au Prince that triggered a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of volunteers distributed across the globe worked together to create an updated and complete digital map of Haiti. Using computers, photographic imagery, and the tools from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, they were able to…
Since the end of the 1980s, exploring the aural dimension of cinematic language has opened a new field of film scholarship. One of the leading figures in this adventure is Michel Chion, a music composer and theoretician, who studies cinematic language with a focus in the auditory realm and the audio-visual relationships. Although sometimes Chion…
“Literacy” is one of the English language words that has become more contested and opaque due to its spawning across diverse fields. Attached to different technologies and activities, the term indicates the existence of certain skills and competences. We heard about computer literacy, media literacy, information literacy, network literacy, digital literacy, critical literacy, design literacy,…
In order to understand the conventions of film music, either from the silent or the sound era (including the silent-to-sound transitional period of 1926-1936), it is useful to look at the theatrical and dramatic practices of the 18th and 19th century. Studying the music and staging conventions of Melodrama, for instance, help us to answer…