Notes tagged with Google

News of the world

Luke McKernan writes:

allthenews

News is not an absolute. Though we talk about world news, what is news to one person is to necessarily news to another. News is a report of an event of specific interest to a particular audience. So it is that online news services such as Google News or Yahoo News offer means to tailor the world’s news streams to your particular interests. Sign up to the BBC news app, and it will shape the news to your location. Publishers deliver, but it is readers and viewers to ultimately construct the news around what interest them, around their world.

Nevertheless the idea remains of an absolute world of news. It’s more a concept for an artist than a journalist, and I have been fascinated by Martin John Callanan‘s online installation, I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. Created for an exhibition held earlier this year by the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art, it persists online. What he has done is generated feeds for all (?) of the world’s newspaper websites where they make their front pages available on a daily basis. This he then ingeniously publishes on a single webpage, allowing you to scroll through hundreds of newspaper pages from every land and language imaginable – and with every concern under the sun. And as a new page is published, so the website changes. The screengrab above is for a small part of the news pages for 30 August 2013, a heady day for news indeed.

scemfa_5478

Callanan’s artwork makes one ponder the nature of news and community. It shows how we all thirst after news, but how different our concerns are. It shows how news separates us, how different we all are, even if the same kinds of story persist wherever we are (celebrities, murder, scandal, sport, animals). it is the world’s news, but also no one’s news in this form.

newsmap

There have been other attempts to pull together the world’s news in one place, for journalistic rather than artistic reasons. Mostly based around maps and Google News feeds, these efforts have come and gone. The standout effort, which is superb as a news source quite as much as an ingenious piece of programming, is design engineer Marcos Weskamp‘s site Newsmap.

Newsmap visualises data from the Google News aggregator on a continual basis, displaying the world’s news with headlines taken from news websites (which link to those sites) displayed according to priority, territory, theme and time. So one can see all the world’s news, algorithmnically ordered according to its significance in relation to other news stories. The newsmap can be tailored to different countries or groups of countries, and is classifiable by themes such as Business, Technology and Sport, which are colour-coded for easy reference. The colour then comes in different shades according to how recent the news is. It is a brilliant realisation of a solution to the information problem Weskamp identifies on his personal site:

Currently, the internet presents a highly disorganized collage of information. Many of us are working in an information-soaked world. There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, bombarded with information; in magazines and advertisements, on TV, radio, in the cityscape. The internet is a wonderful communication tool, but day after day we find ourselves constantly dealing with information overload. Today, the internet presents a new challenge, the wide and unregulated distribution of information requires new visual paradigms to organize, simplify and analyze large amounts of data. New user interface challenges are arising to deal with all that overwhelming quantity of information.

I find that Newsmap is not just an inspired attempt at making the information overload manageable; it makes knowing more about the world desirable. While I Wanted to See All of the News From Today shows how divided we are all, and how mutual understanding is a fantasy, Newsmap demonstrates that our news is anyone’s news. The one cannot contain the world’s news on a screen and can only let us scroll endlessly through page after page. The other distills, condenses, classifies and makes clear. It is news for the world.

Newsmap has been running since 2004, and Weskamp’s last blog entry about the site was in 2010. I do hope it will continue to be supported. It’s one of those key sites that tells you what the Internet is for, and how it has changed us – for the better.

Orginal article

Text Trends newspaper: Environmental

Text Trends newspaper environmental

The second issue of Text Trends newspaper, looking at environmental data, will be available in limited numbers from 14 January 2013 at The Open Data Institute.

Over the past twenty years, global climate change has emerged as the overarching narrative of our age, uniting a series of ongoing concerns about human relations with nature, the responsibilities of first world nations to those of the developing world, and the obligations of present to future generations. But if the climate change story entered the public realm as a data-driven scientific concept, it was quickly transformed into something that the ecologist William Cronon has called a ‘secular prophecy’, a grand narrative freighted with powerful, even transcendent languages and values. And though climate science can sometimes adopt the rhetoric of extreme quantification, it also — as has been seen throughout this book — relies on the qualitative values of words, images and metaphors. This can even happen simultaneously: during the discussions that led up to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report of 2001, for example, a room full of scientists discussed for an entire week whether or not to include the three-word phrase ‘discernable human influence.’ Only three words, perhaps, but three extremely potent words (both qualitatively and quantitavely speaking), that between them tell a vast and potentially world-altering story.

Martin John Callanan’s ongoing Text Tends series offers a deadpan encounter with exactly this kind of quantification of language. Using Google data the series explores the vast mine of information that is generated by the search engine’s users, each animation taking the content generated by search queries and reducing the process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency of search over time, presented in the form of a line graph.

In the online manifestation of the Text Trends animations the viewer watches as the animations plot the ebb and flow of a series of paired search terms keyed into Google over the last ten years by Internet users around the world. In the case of the environment sequence featured here, pairs of words such as: ‘nature’ — ‘population’; ‘climate’ — ‘risk’; ‘consensus’ — ‘uncertainty’; ‘Keeling curve’ — ‘hockey stick’, spool out matter-of-factly, like a live market index, allowing the implied narrative content of these word comparisons (along with their accumulated cultural and emotional baggage) to play themselves out before us. In contrast to the hyperinteractivity of emerging news aggregators and information readers, Text Trends explores our perceptions of words presented as connotation-rich fragments of continually updated time-sensitive data.

As an investigation into both the generation and representation of data, Text Trends offers a visual critique of the spectacularization of information, a cultural tic that continues to generate the endless roll of statistically compromised wallpaper that surrounds so much public science debate, and which our book — Data Soliloquies — has in large part been about.

Richard Hamblyn
original version published in Data Soliloquies, UCL Environment Institute, 2009. ISBN 9780903305044

ISSN 2051-6126
ISBN 9781907829086

Merkske at London Art Book Fair, Whitchapel Gallery, 21–23 September 2012

London Art Book Fair

Merkske will be with Slade Press for the fourth edition of The London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery, it takes place from the 21–23 September 2012.

Merkske published Text Trends: Though Text Trends, Martin John Callanan deals with the spectacularization of information. Using Google data he explores the vast search data of its users. An animation takes the content generated by search queries and reduces this process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency searched for over time, presented in the form of a line graph, 16 of which are reproduced in this book.

Information Distribution Via Digital Media (2011)

Information Distribution Via Digital Media (2011)
Rhizome Curated Exhibition by Joanna Duran

This exhibition presents new media through world news. New innovative ways of communication are infiltrating the lives of people all over the world. We no longer have to wait for the morning paper to hear about current news and world issues now that new digital media brings light to new ways of disbursing information in seconds. These particular artworks retrieve current news by pioneering the use of digital computation and visualization. The Oracle of Elsewhere by Ian Wojtowicz presents us with a 3D generator that exhibits a rotating model of earth. This visualized globe not only conveys current live news around the world, but does so in a way that is extremely innovative with today’s technology by allowing the viewer to geographically choose the current news as it fluctuates through Google’s database. Similar to this oracle the rest of the artworks demonstrate world news as it happens. The artwork created by Martin John Callanan provides a web page that displays single images of hundreds of newspapers from all over the world. As we continue evolving into this new day of age that is the world of technology Callanan and Wojtowicz, as well as others, are able to make latest news available to millions with creative ways of streaming communication.

Text Trends book out now with Merkske

Merkske, Text Trends, Martin John Callanan

Though Text Trends, Martin John Callanan deals with the spectacularization of information. Using Google data he explores the vast search data of its users. An animation takes the content generated by search queries and reduces this process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency searched for over time, presented in the form of a line graph, 16 of which are reproduced in this book.

Презентацију пројекта „Ризом града” (Location of I)

05.07.2010. у 19 часова у Mузеју науке и технике у Београду

Пројекат „Ризом града” представља естетизацију дигиталног уобличавања просторне мреже културног идентитета града Београда. Аутори и учесници пројекта истражују и приказују урбани идентитет кроз субјективно поимање структуре града. Стварањем индивидуалног осећаја простора, на одређеним културолошким пунковима у Београду, уметници трансформишу урбане пејзаже у сплет уметничких, естетских, психолошких, политичких и географских разлика и постављају их у виртуелну мапу света Google Earth. Они формирају базу података – културолошку форму као листу ставки која се реферира на одређену појаву (културолошке пунктове града Београда) без одређеног наратива.
Термин Ризом је преузет из теорије ризома, филозофа Жил Делеза и психоаналитичара Феликса Гатарија. Ризом је модел приказивања света, просторна мрежа, мноштво тачака које су у мећусобној вези, где се све може довести у везу са свим. Ризом искључује централну тачку, средиште, хијерархијску структуру и метафора је за вишезначност, ширење у простору и ширење значења.

Симбол града је сложенији симбол који пружа већу могућност изражавања тензије између геометријске рационалности и сплета људских живота. На том становишту аутори пројекта „Ризом града“ разматрају да је концепт простора утемељен у различитим врстама индивидуалних и колективних искустава. „Геометријски простор“ разликује се од друге спацијалности коју Мерло-Понти дефинише као „антрополошки простор“. Тако долазимо до појма спознајне картографије (cognitive mapping) Фредрика Џејмисона. Та когнитивна мапа не базира се на опонашању и одражавању реалности. Естетика когнитивне картографије је начин којим се друштвено спознајно уцртава индивидуални однос наспрам локалне, националне и интернационалне стварности. Такав став представља одређену врсту искуства у односу према свету, могућност властитог уписивања и сналажења артикулисањем субјективитета унутар менталне, психогеографске карте града.

Учесници пројекта су уметници:

Matrin John Callanan,
Аleš Vaupotič,
Narvika Bovcon,
Franciska Wicke,
Дејан Грба,
Jадранко Баришић,
Тијана Шушница,
Чланови DigitGroup-a:
Драгана Грбић,
Горан Рубил,
Милан Ђурић,
Милош Ђурић.

Seeing Privates

Location of I included in a Rhizome Exhibit curated by Corey Richardson:

This exhibition features four artworks that focus on aspects of surveillance and tracking of the private and public lives of humans in the world of today and the projects were brought together to hopefully expand our consciousness concerning the increasing lack of privacy in our lives today. With the remarkable advances that technology has gone through in the past several years, the lives of people in the world today are more public and available than ever before in history. In this world of Wireless internet, cell phones, digital cameras, credit cards, and surveillance cameras, we are being observed and tracked mare than ever before. It is hard to imagine how often someone is “tracked” everyday of their life and most people don’t think about it, but just like the three artists shown in this exhibition, I hope to open some eyes and get people thinking about the privacy issues of today. So, imagine if you wanted to disappear, hide, or vanish in today’s society. You would need to eliminate ways for anyone to track or watch you, but that is completely impossible it the world of today. That would mean no credit card use, the emails, no cell phone calls, and no internet, but even then, your information and records would still available online and there would still be cameras in every store, school, and on every corner. Staying private is impossible with just simple tasks in today’s life and that’s without even getting the FBI or CIA involved. Technology has made it impossible to “hide” from the world. Just think, Google earth is available to anyone in the world and it is just the tip of the capabilities when it comes to satellite and cameras so imagine what is considered “private” to the general public but is available to governments for surveillance. There are devices being used that the general public won’t know about for another ten years and advances in technology being made everyday. We all might as well live in glass houses, because there really is no private life available anymore.

Martin John Callanan’s artwork shows that it is impossible for the artist to “hide”. His location is constantly being recorded and made available on his site. This piece helps to show the point that we can easily be tracked in today’s world.

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