Curating ActivismData and Technology Workshops

Thomas Mortensson, Helena Ford, Rodric Yates - IBM UK Ltd

Welcome

• Introductions and what we hope we can achieve by the end of the 4 workshops

The start of a 4 day set of workshops

• Today’s workshop is to give a basic grounding in the technology and some of the things you can do using technology.

• Today is about showing, telling but mostly playing

• Maybe you will see some things you know already, maybe it is new territory

Workshop 1 - Introducing Working with Information• Definition of data and computing

• Computing to Generate Art - Showcase & play

• Chaos moving into Mandelbrot - realising beauty from simple maths in realtime. Tom: Mandelbrot, Ellie: FlamePainter

• Working with different ways to access and generate data - Makey Makey; Simple sensors; Air Quality Sensors; Neurosky

• Data sources - Showcase & Play

• Programming to sequence music using Logic Express - then sequencing with your body

• 3d generation of objects - Grapher (Tom) / Sketch up (Ellie)

• Example of simple information using Sentiment Words

• Some simple ways to visualise data - 3djs.org and leaflet

• Manyeyes/metoffice/visual.ly/

• Quality of Life (data.gov.uk) – Bristol Specific Datafeeds (rodric) / publicdata.eu – European wide datasets

• (next session)

• IOC - bringing individual pieces of information together to help cities work better

• Facebook / Cosm / KML

• Twitter as a source of data

• Georeference Dataset (Locations, Lat, Lon, Populations) visualised through Google Maps / Google Earth

• NHS

Workshop 2 - Tools and Techniques pt 1

• Introducing some Visualisation Tools - Showcase

• visual.ly - http://visual.ly

• d3js.org

• leaflet

• icharts - http://www.icharts.net/

• Home Grown (Tom ref: Python)

• wordle/manyeyes - http://www-958.ibm.com/software/analytics/labs/manyeyes/

• Betterworldflux - http://www.betterworldflux.com

• Cosm - http://cosm.com

• ICA - Content and Sentiment Analytics

Workshop 2 - Tools and Techniques pt 2• Getting Computers to do what you want.

• Scratch

• Code Academy

• Pre-built Modules

• Sentiment Analysis Module

• Cosm/KML module

• COSM and Twitter API to load dynamic data calls into Curation

• WordPress

• ManyEyes

• PhotoShop/Paint

• Google Charts/icharts/Google Docs

• Thinking about your project

• what do you want to show, what do you need to do it

• Curation Engine

• How to store information links, projects and outcomes.

Workshop 3 - Hands On: Building your Project

• Objective: Kick off bringing the project together

• Generating content, working on the project with assistance and guidance and committing to the outputs of the project

• End the day with a prototype of the project and documented project plan in the Curation engine

Workshop 4 - Hands On: Curating and Producing your project

• Objective: Completion of the project and packaging the output onto the Curation Server for further re-use.

Questions we want to answer today

• What a computer really is and how to get the most from them

• What is data, information, knowledge, wisdom - how do they differ

• What can I use as input, what can I show as output

• What kind of things are possible without much effort.

Anything that instructs something on how to do something is

Getting information in, doing something with it and pushing information out is Computing

What is data?

• Anything that you can use to generate information

Let’s start to play Creating Beauty using chaos