Friday 6 August 2010

The collapse of European communism, linked with the Berlin Wall, had "a profound effect on British theatremaking" claims Haydon (2009), arguing that "it was possible for British theatremakers to affect a kind of ersatz revolutionary stance", providing a strong and "convenient position" to be critical of the government or capitalism, that "there was a sense that idealism could be powerful, that it could have regime-changing consequences".

In Britain, "it felt as if we'd lost any meaningful opposition" while eastern Europeans were celebrating their newly found freedom...
"A new age of powerlessness had begun, from which I believe we're yet to fully recover. While old leftist playwrights such as David Hare and David Edgar wrote about this changed political landscape (all the way from The Shape of the Table to Berlin, new dramatists began to examine the bleakness of life under unopposed capitalism). Change became personal at best, impossible at worst. Theatre started to look at ways for idealists to co-exist with capitalism. 'We're all part of the system, so let's all try to be nice' seemed to be the new attitude... we now live in a country where half of the banks are virtually state-owned – and there's no talk of an alternative. It feels very much like three generations watching the Berlin Wall being smashed also experienced the breaking of something much bigger." (Haydon, 2009)

Thursday 5 August 2010

MADA MSN3 Critical Evaluation

8th August 2010

This Self-Negotiated unit has provided an in-depth learning experience for me to engage in a thorough research and to focus on those topics of my choice, and it has also allowed me to reflect on the MADA as a whole as it reaches the end of my first year. In this evaluation, I would like to focus on three things:
1) General overview of my experiences,
2) Issues and challenges which have I have become aware of, both theoretical and technical, and 
3) How those issues have provided me with ideas and insights further develop myself.

The unit started with various issues that were unexpected, and often I was unclear to where this project was going, for how far it would go. I was unable to focus on the unit at an early stage as work from my other units had affected the amount of time I could devote. Time management also became problematic towards the end of the unit due to my professional commitment, which resulted as inconsistency in approach to my research and production. I found it difficult to follow my timescale originally proposed in my learning agreement, and this is one of the prominent elements which reflect in the stage I am at in my project.

There are several issues that have come up during the process of research and production, both technical and theoretical. Various concerns started to form as I began my research, showing technical challenges to the project, however, it should be noted that these obstacles resulted in clarifying how I could approach and manage my work scheme as a whole, and schedules for analysis and evaluation was carried out accordingly. Although I have managed to put together a prototype to show the fundamental ideas and highlighted development potentials, two weeks of delay in research on visual presentation which resulted in delaying of production, has left me with small amount of time to reach the final result in time for the twentieth anniversary of the German unification, on 3 October, 2010.

One of the challenges I faced was a technical issue, which involved locating search engines that enabled me to filter and apply the criteria I felt essential. This was made possible only after I had a tutorial with Dr. Phil Archer, a lecturer at NUCA, who also provided me with an enormous amount of skills and knowledge on coding – another crucial tool for the structural basis of my project. Arranging for a tutorial involved discussing it with several lecturers before I could pinpoint what I needed to, and organizational communication was a contributing factor of delay. Coding with Pure Data and Autoitscript, of which I had no understanding of, has contributed greatly towards learning about the digital culture. I feel this was possible due to the nature of this unit, allowing me to endeavor on a project with specialized practices, including an investigation of digital and online methods of data collection; tagging digital mapping and visualization; and publicly accommodated photographic images and how photographers relate to and define their works of images.

My original intention proposed in my learning agreement, to “display an image of the Berlin Wall composed of series of smaller photographs, uploaded online” to represent individuals and their perceptions, is yet completed. Although there are artists and scholars who have connected descriptive text or phrases to photographs online or via their databases (Whitelaw, 2010; Harris, & Kamvar, 2006), I have not been able to directly display the link between perceptions and images. Research on Berliners’ emotions and perceptions were carried out accordingly, although through the process I have realized Flash nor Premiere were fit for use in this project, and introduced programs such as Autoitscript and Pure Data for control and manipulation of images collected online through Flickr Hive Mind. I have not been able to locate the venue or format for means of presentation, but this will become relevant when the project is nearer its completion. Technical challenges, such as representing the ratio of photographs true to its original, appearances of image: time, size, quantity, opacity, overall display of images, and accuracy of individually tagged images – which also raises theoretical questions to definitions of collected images (Pink, 2005) – still remain.

The concept of this project, to visualise Berliners’ perceptions and/or emotions, also raised new set of dilemmas. Through the research process, I have identified and connected the issue of psychosocial divide within Germany with more generally spoken digital divide. This acknowledges the gap of accessibility to the internet within citizens of East and West German states, as well as their cultures which involve possessing digital photography equipments, uploading the photographic images online for the wider public to view, or otherwise. Therefore concepts based on digital technology will, to varying extent, reflecting a stronger Western influence of perceptions – potentially neglecting view and values of citizens in the new Eastern states of Germany, and possibly projecting Western bias.

On reflection, I am confident to claim that the original intent of this project, to visualize Berliners’ perceptions, has partially reached its goal. Through research it became clear that it is technologically possible, with remaining challenges, and has established that values or personal narratives can be connected to photographic images via the web.

This project has also helped me refocus on my areas of expertise, as well as developing, in photojournalism and sociopolitical science. Social phenomena and trends are influenced by historical and cultural environment, and the dialectic characteristics of Berlin, becoming two opposing forces under the influence of the Cold War rivals, and the psychological and cultural effects which are still evident in the unified city today. Based on my previous research on Berliners’ and perceptions on unification, I was able to develop my understanding of visual representation, as well as its current trend of narrative online. Within the culture strengthened by individual initiatives such as blogging, and mass-scale and bottom-up management seen in collective editing and tagging and engaging in them myself, I have gained further understanding of internet and how it influences people’s lives and values. Cultural divide between those with access to internet in comparison to those without, could be applied to former East and West German citizens, and opened up a further scope in researching their interactions online. This will enhance current understandings of the so-called “Wall in the head” or Mauer im Kopf – a term often used to emphasise the divide of individual perceptions and values in two halves of Germany – alongside social and psychological researches carried out to this day.

References: 
Harris, J. & Kamvar, S. (2006) An exploration of human emotion, in six movements. [Online]
http://www.wefeelfine.org/ [04/08/2010]
Pink, D. (2005) Folksonomy. [Online]
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=1 [04/08/2010]
Vander Wal, T. (2010) Understanding the Cost of We Can't Find Anything. [Online] http://www.personalinfocloud.com/folksonomy/ [04/08/2010]
Whitelaw, M. (2010) CommonsExplorer. [Online] http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/ [01/08/2010]

MNS3 Presentation


Wednesday 4 August 2010

Google Insights for "Berlin Wall" Search


Google Insights for Search* picks up quantitative data from the internet with given filter and search terms. The chart above is the search result from: terms berlin wall, berliner mauer; Worldwide, 2004 - present; covering categories: Arts & Humanities, Entertainment, Local, Society, News & Current Events, Reference. Two trends emerge here for the English term "berlin wall": showing a peak in November 2009, 20th anniversary of the Wall being breached which accumulated global interest; as well as repeating global pattern, where every May sees the highest buzz of the year. In contrast, "berliner mauer" (German for the Berlin Wall) sees more an evened out trend, with an increase, over the anniversary.

*The Search analyses a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute the number of searches that have been done for the terms that you've entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. You can choose to see data for select Google properties, including Web search, Images, Product search and News search (certain properties aren't currently available in all countries/territories).

On the results page, you'll see:
a graph with the search volume, indicating interest over time (GMT) for your terms, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms (read more about how we scale and normalise the data)
a breakdown of how the categories are classified
lists of the top searches and top rising searches
a world heat map graphically displaying the search volume index with defined regions, cities and metros
Keep in mind that Insights for Search uses data aggregated over millions of users without personally identifiable information and is powered by computer algorithms. In addition, it only displays results for search terms that receive a significant amount of traffic and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.


Google Insights for Search (2010) Web Search Interest: berlin wall, berliner mauer. [Online] 

Folksonomy

What was once claimed "a new approach to [online] categorization" (Pink, 2005), might help my project. Tagging by users, for example on Flickr, allows searches to retrieve a particular categories of photos. Although some say people are not categorizing information, but "throwing words out there for their own use", the system produces a self-organized classification of digital material online. Whilst other people can examine and label your photos, and "is idiosyncratic rather than systematic" which sacrifices "perfection" to lower the barrier to entry.
"Officials from the Guggenheim, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a half-dozen other establishments are taking a folksonomic approach to their online collections by allowing patrons to supplement the specialized lexicon of curators". (Pink, 2005)
Pink, D.H. (2005) Folksonomy. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=3 [04/08/2010]

Unification not Complete

"German unification is not complete", Angela Merkel admitted shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Wall's opening (SMD, 2009). Many in Germany still feels "the economic, social and psychological divisions once demarcated by the Wall" and "the country had yet to fulfil promises made when East and West reunited in 1990", claimed CNN (2009).

She has also said that Germany faced "a challenge the likes of which it has not seen since reunification," a reference to the immense costs of raising the social and economic standards in the former East to the levels equivalent to western regions (Dempsey, 2009). 

"In the new (former East German) states we also have far greater structural unemployment than is the case in the old federal republic", claimed the German chancellor, and reunification a "political and economic success for the people in all parts of Germany" even though it has "not yet been achieved in all areas"   (DPA, 2010)

Interior Minister, Thomas de Maiziere, who had been a state secretary for West Germany - and his cousin Lothar de Maiziere was East Germany’s only freely elected premier - argued, "we objectively had too little time, we were driven people". West Germans had taken a "paternalistic stance towards the East — along the lines of 'we know what’s right for our sisters and brothers in the East'", stated de Maiziere, although "in truth, we did not know" (DPA, 2010)

These reports confirm the mentality in Germany, that after 20 years since the Wall was breached and €1.3 trillion (SMD, 2009) later, the social and psychological divide is still evident. 

CNN (2009) Berlin celebrates night that changed world. [Online] 
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/09/berlin.wall.anniversary/index.html [04/08/2010]
Dempsey, J. (2009) Merkel Says Worst Still Ahead in Germany. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/business/global/11debt.html?_r=1 [04/08/2010]
DPA (2010) 20 years on, German reunification still not complete: Merkel. [Online] http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article487380.ece [04/08/2010]
SMD (2009) 20 Years On Berlin Celebrates the Day the Wall Fell. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,660134,00.html [04/08/2010]

The Visible Archive


Whitelaw and Hinton began working for a "show everything" interface for the State Library of New South Wales, Australia, then developed the idea for the Flickr Commons (Whitelaw, 2010). He has also worked on A1 Explorer, another interface where key phrases are linked to archived photographs.

This is an idea to connect the uploaded photographs in my project with words, from photo description of the images or blogs, to link images and text which may include preceptions.


Whitelaw, M. (2010) CommonsExplorer. [Online] http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/ [01/08/2010]

Monday 2 August 2010

tutorial with Phil

22 July 2010

discussed ways of:
a) collecting photographic data online, and
b) coding, to visualise/control the collected images.

Online image data collection
WIG 
Searches Google under a set criterion and keywords, downloads the images and then saves in a folder. Free version (WIG Light) or €20 for a version with no limits to the amount of images to download. It can also translate search phrase into other languages [WIG, 2010].


Another website introduced to me was Fiveprime and its Flickr Hive Mind. Hive Mind is a "data mining tool" which allows users to sort photographic images from Flickr, that includes searching images with licenses that allow non-commercial and commercial use [Siemers, 2010].

In order to collect recently uploaded images, Autoitscript was used to refresh the Hive Mind page every 5 minutes, with the phrase "berlin wall" in the tag search box and searching under "recent". The new photos, provided they have been some photos uploaded since the previous Autoitscript search, will now be downloaded into a folder.  

Image display/presentation
To manipulate/control the presentation of images, we have used Pure Data. This controls:
  •  how the photos appear and disappear - controlling the image size to first appear small and then enlarge, pause for 2 seconds, and then reduce to nothing again,
  •  to which positions (there are 3 positions in this prototype window) to display the images in,
  •  and select a random image from the 50 recent photos that have been downloaded by Autoitscript.




Elements to consider, or to refine, are:
  • length of time each image is displayed, and between each photo to appear in one of the windows, 
  • what the size of the window is to be (for the prototype, it is only large enough to display 3 photos),
  • how the images appear and disappear: speed, size, opacity, and quantity of images.

Autoitscript (2010) http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml [02/08/2010]
IEM [2010] Pure Data. [Online] http://puredata.info/ [02/08/2010]
Siemers, N. [2010] Flickr Hive Mind. [Online] http://fiveprime.org/ [02/08/2010]
WIG [2010] WebImageGrab version 7.5. [Online]
http://www.sas21.de/apps/webimagegrab/ [02/08/2010]

creating PDF files online

5 PDF file conversions
web conferencing with up to 3 people
presentations creation and shared data and list management
forum based support

https://acrobat.com/#page=signup_only&su=1

Adobe Systems Incorporated (2010) Convert to PDF. [Online] http://www.adobe.com/acom/createpdf/ [31/07/2010]

Sunday 1 August 2010

Graft

The Graft website has a visual which gives the impression that the world is alive, organic, and made of numerous small individual dots.

Graft [2010] http://www.graftlab.com/ [01/07/2010]

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot

Microsoft Silverlight, launched to compete with Flash, visualises data in the form of tables, combining similar images on the internet (Bedwell, 2010). Another tool to visualise images based on data, and keywords.


Bedwell, H. (2010) Microsoft Pivot. [Online] http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/social-media-pr-blog/infographic-visualisation-tools/ [01/08/2010]

visualising text into structures



This is possibly for later stages to develop my project, linking words/ideas/values together with another, with photographs - and the possibilities of visualising text too.

Gambette, P. (2009) Visualising a Text with a Tree Cloud. [Online]

visualising text into structures



This is possibly for later stages to develop my project, linking words/ideas/values together with another, with photographs - and the possibilities of visualising text too.

Gambette, P. (2009) Visualising a Text with a Tree Cloud. [Online]

more visualising tools

Ideas of visualisation, some that can link concepts or text-based information to images, and with Flickr images, which could contribute towards my project.

Collects Flickr uploaded images, and visualises
Flickrtime [2010] The Moment. [Online]
http://www.hottoast.org/convexstyle/flickrtime/ [01/08/2010]

Articles, linked with photographs
Newsmap (2010) [Online] http://newsmap.jp/ [01/08/2010]

Various functions, to track activities on websites and searches
Crazy Egg (2010) What does Crazy Egg do? [Online] https://www.crazyegg.com/overview
[01/08/2010]


http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/ [01/08/2010]
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/ [01/08/2010]
http://hootsuite.com/ [01/08/2010]
http://www.twitscoop.com/ [01/08/2010]

why and how of visualisation

Methodological visualisation of data, illustrated by Joel Laumans, offering ideas about patterns of display and presentation.

Laumans, J. [2010] An Introduction to Visualising Data. [Online]

http://piksels.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/visualizingdata.pdf [01/08/2010]