Lehrblogger

Every once in a while one comes across a sphinx (or other creature), and it can be useful to know something that Google doesn’t…

1. My four lines all meet at a single place,
   I hide nothing behind this outer face.
   I’m cyclic like that circular serpent,
   Each of us eternally recurrent.
   Although you first met me just recently,
   I’ll introduce myself eternally.

2. Everyone wants a break from me,
   Attempting to charm me is often self-deceiving.
   Some consider me to be quite the lady,
   Although I tend to run out and go streaking.

3. Turning my back to you is out of the question.
   I’m sometimes half full, but never half empty.
   Artificiality plagues my every companion,
   So I play with the waves and the sea.

4. I have twelve faces and forty digits. What am I?

These are quite old, from August 2003, but come in handy every so often. The improvement to the first one was made more recently, in February 2009.

I wanted to move some of the lengthy text (that was originally written for the ITP Projects Database) off of the main TwiTerra page, and I’m backdating this post so that readers don’t see it again.

Personal Statement

I have been fascinated by Twitter since I signed up for it several months ago. I am particularly interested in the widespread social customs (including the use of retweets and hashtags) that have become popular without being fundamental to the system, as well as in the potential for exploring the data that these conventions make accessible.

I am also interested in the negative social consequences of homophily, and I am interested in the ways in which new technologies such as Twitter can break down those barriers of similarity and create more geographically and culturally diverse communities.

Background

My primary research has been several months of personal Twitter use. I have also spent time browsing the public feed of tweets from all users, exploring various search queries, and reading articles by a variety of bloggers. In addition, I explored political Twitter memes in somewhat more depth in a paper for Clay Shirky’s class on the election.

Audience

Everyone: Twitter non-users who are skeptical about its usefulness and worth as well as current Twitter users will appreciate the visualization of how it brings the world together.

User Scenario

A visitor or group of visitors would see the globe visualization on a large screen from several yards away, and would be able to watch several iterations of retweet trees during their approach. Upon arrival, visitors would be able to read the text of a handful of tweets in the visualization before I presented the one-line pitch. For the majority that is unlikely to be familiar with Twitter, I could explain the basic concept (“140-character status updates for interested friends, family, coworkers and strangers”) and the idea of a retweet (“repeating an idea or passing on a message from a person that you are following to all of the people who are following you, with attribution given to the original author”). I would provide further explanation to those that required it, and I would offer implementation details to those that had sufficient aptitude/interest.

Conclusion

Prior to this project, I did not have substantive experience with either Scala, PHP or MySQL, and I learned a lot about working with those tools. In addition, I now feel relatively comfortable with NASA’s World Wind Java libraries, despite their relatively sparse documentation. I also became much better at searching around on the Internet for solutions to programming problems.

Keywords

Twitter, memes, social media, geolocation, NASA, networks, homophily

Read the final revision of my second paper below, download the PDF, and/or read the original.

Update: Clay has posted a zip file of many of our papers in one of his guest posts on Boing Boing!

Supporting the Supporters in the 2012 Election: Video Media

The success of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign can be attributed to the enthusiastic efforts of a large number of supporters, many of whom created and distributed pro-Obama video media. These media are poised to play an increasingly important role in the future, and campaigns should adopt strategies for the 2012 election to more fully support the efforts of these supporters 1.

Hip-hop artist will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video has been viewed well over fifteen million times 2, the “Dear Mr. Obama” video by an Iraq War veteran has over thirteen million views 3, and Obama Girl’s first video has been viewed nearly twelve million times 4. These videos represent only the tip of the tip of an iceberg of user-generated content relating to the 2008 election. A small number of videos have reached this uppermost level of popularity, a larger number have been somewhat less popular, and a huge number have only hundreds or even dozens of views (a YouTube search for “obama” returns 784,000 results*5).

This ‘long tail’ of hundreds of thousands of non-viral videos might have had substantial and under-appreciated political import 6. In an article titled “It’s the Conversations Stupid! – The Link between Social Interaction and Political Choice,” Valdis Krebs observes that, “after controlling for personal attitudes and demographic membership, researchers found social networks, that voters are embedded in, exert powerful influences on their voting behavior” 7. Imagine the video creator who spends hours on a short video with a political agenda. That person certainly wants as many people as possible to see the video, so she will email it to all of her friends and ask that they email it to their friends. Critically, for the first few times it is forwarded, the video has an increased effect on the viewer because that viewer has a social connection to the person who created it and whose opinions it represents. The enhanced effects of these relatively unpopular videos can be aggregated over the huge number of them that constitute the long tail, and this aggregate results in electoral influence that a campaign can use to its advantage.

The explosion of video in this election occurred for two primary technological reasons: first, there are free online forums such as YouTube for the hosting, searching, and sharing of video media; and second, the computers used to make these videos have become easier to operate and less expensive to purchase. The digital landscape will change again before the 2012 election, and it would serve a campaign well to anticipate (and potentially direct) these changes to better support the user creation of media. Although many people did have the knowledge and tools necessary to produce political content for the recent election, many did not. A campaign can provide these tools, information about how to use them, primary source content that can enrich them, and a community to encourage their production.

Web-based applications that run in a browser window are becoming increasingly popular for common tasks such as email, calendar management, and document editing. Although often less powerful than their desktop counterparts, they have the significant advantage that users do not need to download or install any software. Jumpcut.com is a web application that offers free video hosting services (similar to YouTube’s) and free video editing tools (similar to that found in a basic desktop application such as Apple’s iMovie) 8. The startup was founded in 2005, launched a public beta in April 2006, and was bought by Yahoo that October 9. If a campaign licensed the use of this functionality from Yahoo or hired developers to recreate it, then it could empower all of its supporters with Internet access (either at home or at a public location) to create and distribute political videos. Although this would be unlikely to have an effect on the quantity or quality of the highly viral videos, it would stretch out the long tail so that even more supporters can create content and send it to trusting contacts.

In addition to providing these tools, the campaign could provide official instructional videos, help documents, and other information to teach supporters how to use them. This would further stretch the long tail to include nearly all supporters interested in creating content, regardless of hardware/software ownership or pre-existing technical skill.

The campaign can further facilitate the media creation process by providing easily accessible source content. Currently, supporters find clips on YouTube and then download, edit, and re-upload them as parts of their own videos. The campaign could provide original, high-quality versions of all candidate speeches, interviews and other appearances, thus saving supporters time that was previously spent searching through YouTube videos for quality source files. To further facilitate finding this content, the campaign could offer searching of not just videos but also the transcribed text of those videos. It is currently very difficult for a supporter to find an instance of a candidate discussing a particular issue if that person does not remember where or when the candidate spoke on the topic, and searchable transcripts would make supporters no longer limited to what they had previously seen.

Finally, the campaign can further strengthen its existing online social network by focusing activity around this process of video creation. Online forums and chat rooms would enable supporters to discuss their videos, share tips, answer questions, and provide feedback that would refocus content to be maximally effective. In addition, it might encourage users to reframe videos that had been intended only to be humorous or to market their creators (such as Taryn Southern’s “Hott 4 Hill[ary]” Obama-Girl copycat videos 10) so that they made a stronger political statement. The campaign could also attempt to replicate some of Flickr’s success with groups focused around particular types of image creation by supporting groups focused on a particular video technique. Just as Flickr has groups for those interested in high dynamic range photography, groups could be created on the campaign’s website for those interested in making videos that used a green screen to combine clips (as in the Obama Girl videos).

Furthermore, the situating of supporters’ video editing activities within the context of the campaign’s website allows the campaign some degree of message direction. Decisions about page design, the wording of instructions, and the choice of example videos can all set the tone that the supporters will be working within when making their own videos. In addition, an active community might have a moderating influence on the content of the videos so that damaging outliers (such as the pro-Obama “Sing for Change” video that was repurposed by Republicans 11) might be toned down before going public.

Note that the campaign would still be able to avoid direct involvement with the video creation process and therefore abdicate responsibility for problematic content. The campaign should also be careful not to give supporters the impression that creation of media is a sufficient substitute for other forms of involvement such as canvassing or phone banking. Instead, the campaign should highlight videos that demonstrated that their creators were volunteering in additional ways. Supporters who contribute to the campaign often consider themselves to have made an investment in it, and thus it is to their advantage to further help that campaign to succeed because they want a return on that investment. The campaign should design the opportunities for supporter involvement to be mutually complimentary, encouraging supporters to become actively involved in multiple ways.

In conclusion, a 2012 presidential campaign should take advantage of existing frameworks and upcoming technologies to support its supporters in producing political video media. The campaign should embrace the aggregate electoral importance of the long tail of supporter created videos. Specifically, campaigns should offer free online video editing and hosting services so that as many supporters as possible can make a contribution. The campaign should also provide supporters with information about how to use these video creation tools, the source content necessary to make their arguments, and a social community in which to discuss their creations. Supporters would feel more invested in getting their candidate elected to office, thus strengthening the campaign on multiple levels in a variety of social networks.

*YouTube limits search functionality to provide a limited number of results per query, and this complicates gathering more detailed information for less popular videos.

1. “Support the supporters” phrase from unpublished articles and lectures by Clay Shirky
2. “Yes We Can” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY
3. “Dear Mr. Obama” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8
4. “I Got a Crush…On Obama” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU
5. Youtube search for ‘obama’ – http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=obama
6. The Long Tail on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
7. Valdis Krebs – http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Nine-Krebs.pdf
8. Jumpcut.com – http://jumpcut.com/
9. Jumpcut.com on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpcut.com
10. “Hott 4 Hill – She’s Hott For Hillary!!” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sudw4ghVe8
11. “Sing for Change Obama” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb8ntODQha4

The Spring courses to which I have been assigned are as follows:

• Design for UNICEF (Thur 09:30am to 12:00pm – Clay Shirky)
  UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) takes on issues affecting the health, well-being and opportunities of children and youth around the world. Increasingly, this includes creating and managing novel communications tools, from online forums for youth journalism or story-telling to support for youth AIDS activists. It also includes physical design challenges like designing off-the-grid communications infrastructure. (A list of relevant projects can be found at Mepemepe.com) In this class, students examine some of the design challenges UNICEF faces, and will work in groups to research and prototype possible extensions to existing efforts. The first third of the semester involves understanding the goals and constraints of various UNICEF projects, the middle third involves each workgroup selecting and developing a prototype project, and the final third involves soliciting user feedback and professional critique of that prototype. The class includes site visits and project crits from UNICEF technologists and field workers, and culminates in final presentations to members of the UNICEF staff
• Programming from A to Z (Tues 09:30am to 12:00pm – Adam Parrish)
  This course focuses on programming strategies and techniques behind procedural analysis and generation of text-based data. We’ll explore topics ranging from evaluating text according to its statistical properties to the automated production of text with probabilistic methods. Using real world data sets we’ll build examples of document classifiers, recommendation engines, and language generators. Examples are demonstrated using Java, Processing, and PHP with a focus on advanced data structures (linked lists, hash tables, binary trees) associated with storing and manipulating data. Prerequisite: H79.2233 Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.
• Little Computers (Tues 12:30pm to 3:00pm – David Nolen)
  Apple sold the iPhone as a phone, but its buyers use it as a little computer. In no time, hackers cracked the phone and found it to be not much different than their OS X based laptops and desktops. The cute device runs a mature UNIX based operating system and it supports most of Apple’s object-oriented API, Cocoa. The class covers object oriented programming, C/Objective-C/Objective-C++, scripting languages, OS X internals, Interface Builder, and XCode. The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch APIs covered include: Quartz, OpenGL, Core Location, CFNetwork (wifi), as well open source frameworks such as GData (Google) and XMPPFramework (Jabber). Access to a Mac running OS X 10.5 is the minimum requirement, but having a real Cocoa Touch device like the iPhone or the iPod Touch to test on will make the class more enjoyable. The class is highly technical in nature and is geared to intermediate to advanced programmers, or /extremely/ dedicated beginners. That said, the goal of the course is to actively and creatively explore this new field of little computers using the iPhone as the main research platform.
• Mainstreaming Information (Mon 2:30pm to 5:25pm – Lisa Strausfeld / Christian Schmidt)
  Information sources that have the power to impact our day-to-day lives on topics such as global and domestic politics, health, the economy, and the environment, are now readily available online. The best information design work is still primarily relegated to obscure journals and websites, and asks too much from the viewer. This workshop aims to bring information sources we all care about into the mainstream. Our goal is to explore how selective streams of information can be sited and expressed in a way that not only creates engagement on the part of the viewer, but inspires action. Students work on a two-part semester-long design project based on an information source of their choice. Basic programming or action-script skills are required. The class is conducted as a design studio with bi-monthly critiques. It includes seminar discussions and guest visits by experts in the design profession. All aspects of visual communication are addressed, with an emphasis on typography, layout, color, and motion. Students need not have any formal design training, but should come with a particular interest in and commitment to honing their design skills. Note: This course meets for 12 sessions beginning Monday, January 26.

The first three were the top three in the preferences that I listed, and the final course was fifth, so I am quite thrilled with what I got. I still plan to shop several other courses though, including 1′, 2′, 10′, When Strangers Meet (for which I am first on the wait list) and Digital Imaging: Reset (which have descriptions here).

project page with previous posts here

I resolved a couple of bugs in the line drawing animation, and now my database calls are made for each tree before it attempts to start drawing lines (allowing for a smoother animation). I also got the built-in View state iterator to work and make the globe rotate. Although much needs to be done before the project is ready to present, i think I’ve found solutions to the major challenges. A video is below:

TwiTerra Milestone from me on Vimeo.

I am hoping to do a number of things before presenting it in class next week, but for now I need to spend a few days working on my AJAX keyboard portfolio project. This list includes:

• the spinning of the globe should follow the animation of the tweet lines, rather than spin continuously (this should eliminate the unwanted pause between rotations)
• the lines between tweet coordinates are not interpolating correctly due to the way that latitude and longitude correspond to globe positions – this just needs a little bit of math to fix
• I need to show the text of the tweet, either as an Annotation object on the globe or somewhere else
• I want to filter so that I am showing the most interesting trees, based on tree complexity, the distance between tweets and the locations of the tweets