serial consign

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.

Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

The above scenario is an excerpt from Dan Hill's provocative text, The Street as Platform, posted on City of Sound earlier this year. In this meandering commentary, Hill takes a bird's-eye view of urban space and storyboards the city as a truly networked environment. In this city of bits, information pertaining to pedestrian and traffic flows, commercial exchange, infrastructure updates and architectural intelligence is aggregated, shared and brokered through a range of locative devices and translated into content across a variety of web services. When considered as a conglomeration of data trajectories, urban space begins to take on an almost organic character, one with a pulse and homeostasis.

[stephen kieran & james timberlake's update of le corbusier's modular man / from their 2003 text refabricating architecture]

I've revisited Dan's post several times over the past few months and in doing so I am constantly reminded of Adrian Holovaty's ambitious Everyblock project. Everyblock is an urban-aggregator, one which pulls together numerous streams of data into a unified civic interface. The system provides a means to sort through the itemized and classified "news" of the city (the paper trail of building permits, crime reports, lost and found reports, geotagged photos, etc.) or to explore data spatially by neighbourhood or district. Launched this past January, Everyblock has been funded by a Knight News Challenge grant. The site is a direct descendant of Chicago Crime, Holovaty's noteworthy 2005 Google Maps mashup [see previous post]. Everyblock currently allows users access to a wide array of information pertaining to New York, Chicago and San Francisco with plans for future expansion to additional cities.

One of the most interesting facets of this project is that it has provided an additional perspective to the age-old "story-centric" worldview in journalism, where news is viewed as a narrative and packaged and redistributed as a product. When broken down into discrete units (location, time, place, etc.), the data connected to various events throughout the city can provide context about the metabolism of the city around us. So instead of relying on the investigative perspicacity of local journalists, a citizen could do a little data-crunching on Everyblock and determine that violent crime had actually increased in their neighbourhood since an anti-graffiti program had been instituted by a finger-pointing police chief who was convinced of a connection between the two phenomena. This ability to harvest information pertaining to specific "granular locations" is the strength of Everyblock, a venue which Holovaty has contextualized as a place where:

...you'll find out when your local pizza place is inspected, but you won't find an analysis of the mayoral budget or Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics (unless they plan to build a stadium near your house).

So maybe we shouldn't be referring to the "informatized" city as being composed of bits, or as a data town, perhaps City of Nodes is the most appropriate description.

Everyblock has definitely staked a claim somewhere in the no man's land between old media and new journalism, but there has been surprisingly little commentary from the urban design and architectural contingents. Open API cartographic ventures have changed perception and civic consciousness about the representation of the city—how might these new data tools change our relationship and awareness of flows of information through the city? We've heard much talk about citizen journalism over the last several years, what about citizen statisticians?

Hopefully this post will inspire some exploration of Everyblock, as direct experience is the best way to get a sense of the scope of this venture. Holovaty has taken part in some quality interviews about the project over the last few months. Check out his appearance on Fimoculous and his discussion with Jon Udell. Matt Waite also posted a very nuanced critique of Everyblock shortly after it launched.

While exploring Everyblock I can't help but think of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, specifically the mercantile city of Ersilia. In Ersilia:

...the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their support remains.

Limited only by emerging municipal information sharing initiatives and data scraping ingenuity, Everyblock has the potential to develop into an extremely robust prototype for the next generation of urban informatics. Consider the manner in which Craigslist has has become an interface for urban life in the cities in which it has been deployed, perhaps Everyblock will be an equally influential civic tool in the coming decade.

A tip of the cap to David Cohn for directing me toward Matt Waite's great commentary on Everyblock.

The above screen capture is pulled from the explanation for Burak Arikan and Engin Erdogan's exciting new User Labor project. With this venture, Burak and Engin have developed User Labor Markup Language (ULML), an XML format for determining the value of online activity, interaction and connectivity. The project neatly dovetails with other web initiatives like Data Portability and OpenSocial but moves beyond discussions about online identity and data ownership into the realm of quantifying the value of user contributions to web services. The User Labor statement contextualizes the project in light of a Web 2.0 business model we have all become rather accustomed to:

Granted, the user is already getting compensated by using the service for free in exchange with advertisement exposition. But, the value of the web service is based on the sum of service facilitation and content production, and the user appears as a stakeholder twice in the service ecology, as the consumer and the producer of the service. Thus, in order for the production cycle to sustain itself in the long term, there should be compensation for producing the content as well as using the service for free. Before speculating on the form of compensation, the value of user contribution needs to be transparent and its metrics should be defined.

This is a really exciting and empowering proposition for the legions of self-appointed and collectively elected info-brokers that populate the web. The mere existence of a metric like this speaks to the possibility of collective ownership of rather than congregation around online communities. At the very least User Labor makes undertakings like Facebook's Social Ads seem like a fairly self-interested means of tracking and capitalizing on user-generated content.

I don't really have time to do this project justice, but you should definitely check out userlabor.org for a full description and lots of examples of how ULML could be deployed. Craig Bellamy also weighed in on the project last week and contextualized it in relation to academic production. ULML is currently implemented on Meta-Markets, perhaps we'll see it elsewhere soon? Great work Burak and Engin!