Image Conversations

Slideshows can be “interactive”

19Nov09

The visual arts often raise important social questions and creative representations of current exhibitions are a great way to encourage image conversations with your readers.

This slideshow, from KCET’s SoCal Connected, about a recent art show is a great example of how to make your slideshows interactive – ask your viewers to actively piece together the information.

The art installation by Travis Somerville plays with the notion of stereotypes from the days in the South when “Whites only ” and “Blacks only” drinking fountains “were not art, but real life”. KCET asks their viewers to see if they can spot the stereotypes:

Sommerville has taken the idea to another level. Whether it’s a higher or lower level is up to you, but here’s a kind of puzzle made from the images to see how quickly you can recognize the stereotypes.

We are now at a stage with online presentations where sites that do not provide a slideshow with their review of an exhibition are not really doing their job. This NYT review of a group show of Pakistani artists was fascinating but desperately needed a slideshow of the art it talked about.

This slideshow about a recent Ed Ruscha retrospective is a perfect example of how you can use slideshows together with extended captions to provide a detailed self contained review.

more about “Swallowing Stereotypes – SoCal Connected“, posted with vodpod

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Tags: art reviews, slideshows

YouTube Direct for news

17Nov09

YouTube has just announced an exciting opportunity that will allow news organisations and community groups to use a new service to generate user content. It will allow other media organisations to replicate a CNN iReport style structure without setting up their own infrastructure. Media Week reports:

YouTube is set to roll out a free tool that will enable any news-oriented site to automatically become a hub for user-produced news videos. The company has introduced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that any interested news site can tap into and begin soliciting content from its users. The Google-owned company has already begun testing YouTube Direct with The Huffington Post, NPR.com, Politico.com and the Web sites for the San Francisco Chronicle and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston, Mass.

According to Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, news sites can easily add Direct to their sites; start requesting specific content from users (such as eyewitness videos of the most recent hurricane, for example); and then decide for themselves what clips are used on their own sites when. The tool is designed to be customizable, allowing news sites to create a product that looks and feels like the rest of their Web site. “This is like a virtual assignment desk,” said Grove.

Throughout YouTube’s history, users have posted news-oriented clips, said Grove. But those have been tough for news sites to find in a timely fashion, making it hard for them to leverage.

“Citizen journalism is one of the most interesting phenomenon on YouTube,” he said—citing Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 election as examples. “But news organizations have had a hard time tapping into that. Videos are hard to find, verification can be tough and there is not really a great way on the site to target contributors….This is about giving our news community something they are asking for.”

It is now up and ready on the YouTube site. Here’s the post from the YouTube biz blog

Here’s the project page

And the FAQ.

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Tags: video, YouTube

Obama’s election: how do you feel?

06Nov09

The New York Times have been leaders in the use of innovative data visualisations and data mapping graphics. These range from data mapping the spread of sub prime mortagages through to their reader interactive word chart that tracks how readers are feeling about President Obama one year on.

One year ago, we asked NYTimes.com readers for a single word to describe their mood about the presidential election. The response was overwhelming (73,400 words) and varied widely, with “hopeful” and “anxious” as the top choices.

Now, a year after the election of Barack Obama, we want to know: Has your mood changed? Are you energized, hopeful, disappointed, ambivalent or outraged? As Jeff Zeleny wrote Tuesday, Mr. Obama has now seen his pledge to transform the country give way to some of the hardened realities of office. While it will be years before it is possible to gauge the success of his governing agenda, his record for some of the issues on which he campaigned is beginning to come into focus.

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Tags: NYT, Obama

Twistori: loving, hating, believing, feeling and wishing on Twitter

06Nov09

Twistori is another example of visualising the stream of consciousness from the Twitter stream created by @amyhoy and @thomasfuchs. You can view a stream of tweets that mention love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish. You can also download a Mac desktop screen saver.

While Twistori is beautifully presented and captures the diverse collective consciousness of Twitter – from the sublime to the banal – as ReadWriteWeb points out other visualisation tools have also started to collect some interesting data from similar experiments:

Twistori, according to the site, is the “first step in an ongoing social experiment.” The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter (via Summize) containing specific keywords: i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, and i wish. In then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.

It’s not clear from the site what the second step in the experiment is, but Hoy and Fuchs say that the project was inspired by We Feel Fine, which aggregates feelings from a large number of blogs and social sites. We Feel Fine created a number of explorable data visualizations based on the feelings it gathered, and used it to draw some interesting broad conclusions.

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Tags: twitter, Twistori, We feel fine

Journal of the Collective Me

06Nov09

There are a range of great tools available that track Twitter and present the data in interesting visual ways. Brian Piana (follow him for great data visualisation links) has created a range of exciting art projects using Twitter. One that is endlessly fascinatingt is his Journal of the Collective Me which collects references to “me” from throughout the Twitterverse.

Piana explains its evolution

After launching When Did THIS Happen a few weeks back, I saved a Twitter search for “when did this happen” to see the piece had any legs. (It did not.) But I became fascinated seeing how the phrase was being used and by whom. It gave me a glimpse into this really diverse international community, where preteens, parents, grandparents, college students, working professionals, etc., all have a voice. And these individual voices can be sarcastic, inspirational, desperate, threatening, and even hateful. This project looks to unify all of these disparate voices into one.

Journal of the Collective Me (www.thecollectiveme.com) parses through the Twitterverse, presenting tweets containing the word “me” in real time. Other phrases and words have been filtered out to reduce spam and disguise the source. Content itself is not edited, so the incoming tweets range from happy to funny to sad to serious to obscene. Clicking on the current entry will produce the next, and so forth. Regarding aesthetic, Journal of the Collective Me was
inspired by the simple stylings of yet another Internet meme, Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, which rose to fame during the election.

Very special thanks go to Donovan Buck, who bought into the concept and provided the wonderful scripting that makes it work.

The screen shots below show the funny, disturbing and poignant mix: