Illust. by Rebecca Sugar.

I was thinking about how many artists and content creators make use of social media sites specializing in sharing such as tumblr, Deviant Art (which has frankly been waining in popularity), Soup (a newcomer to the scene), and Pixiv (a Japanese outlier), to get their material out there. Some people post on these sites as part of their hobby, for some they are hoping to break into a scene, and others make these sites their very livelihood. These creators range in profession from storyboard artists and showrunners for major television networks to professional comic authors to amateur/hobbyist illustrators. For some their content is their job, for others it is their passion, and for a lucky few it is both.

All of these sites have their own unique interfaces and qualities, but they all provide a very basic means for its users to indicate a level of approval for the content that is posted and then disseminate said content among other viewers. All of these sites also attract a wide range of content creators from many different regions. Off the top of my head, on tumblr I follow an artist in Arizona, two in Germany, a handful in Japan, one in Aruba, a bunch in New York and New Jersey, a sizable chunk in California, two or so in Mexico, one in Spain, an Englishman, and I think an Australian or two. Many of these content creators have followers ranging from tens, to hundreds, and some of them have thousands. Their styles are disparate (though their seems to be a general commonality in their age range), though their followers intersect like hundreds of tiny venn diagrams.

The data I wish to extrapolate is where are the people that are “liking” this content? Is there any correlation between the content posted and where the people are that “like” it? Is there any commonality between where a content creator is from and where her or his fans are from? On a site like tumblr content posters can add tags for those searching for a certain subject, but it’s a rather crude system and when someone reblogs a picture the tags are rarely maintained. I still need to figure out the logistics, but I want to try and map regional data with tags and content creators and see how it all connects.

As an aside, I also saw a curious news item on a Spanish retro-gaming blog (http://www.repisanintendo.cl/post/101105828474/japon-podria-comenzar-a-enfrentar-un-irreversible). The basic gist is that with the rise in interest in retro gaming from various podcasts, collectors, YouTube personalities and and the like, it seems that Japan’s vintage game stores, particularly in Tokyo have been seeing their stock become rapidly depleted by tourist collectors. I can’t put my finger exactly on what data to extract from this or how, but I feel like there’s something fascinating to be found.

I imagine people found these on last year’s syllabus, but I figured since I didn’t see links for this week on our current syllabus, it would be nice to copy them to a place I frequent more often.

• Tom Scheinfeldt, Intro to Project Management Notes
• Bethany Nowviskie, Ten Rules for Humanities Scholars New to Project Management (pdf)
• Sharon Leon, “Project Management for Humanists”
• John Unsworth, “The Importance of Failure”

Thanks, Evan, for the R Intro Thursday. And thanks, Daria and Stephen for the links!

-Jojo

I really liked Manovich’s overview of ‘big social data’, and was glad to have read it first of his three readings for the week, to use as a guide. In particular, I was fascinated by two of his paradigms—between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ data and, in context of information visualization, between description and prediction in explaining what information visualization is (and/or is supposed to do).

What does data visualization do? Is it just descriptive (and if so, how does including a description that is visual improve our comprehension of the thing in question, as compared to or in addition to a description that is purely textual?)? Or predictive, a counterpart to inferential statistics? I’ve always put things into pictures to understand them, and I am crazy about Scott McCloud’s high recommendable book on comics [Understanding Comics], which shows (in comic form) how pictures and text can go together to explain or evoke things like space and time better than just pictures or text alone. So I’m a big fan of this new infographics/data visualization trend.

But I wanted to discuss Manovich’s discussion of sampling and behavior data, though class starts in 5 minutes. To be continued..

“I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five.

 These words were written in 1969, while Vietnam was getting doused in napalm, the UNIX system was developed and the CDC 7600, arguably the first supercomputer, was constructed. All of these events have had repercussions echoing through time, while also becoming the proverbial bug in amber. These ideas of time and space being malleable echo some of the concepts of a Hypercity. I can’t help but wonder if Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is perhaps an indication that a Hypercity is a sort of eventual societal goal, even if before anyone knew what it was.

 The Fukushima and Tranquil_Dragon portion of Hypercities, with its blow-by-blow recollection of fear and destruction, made me think about how the past on the internet is something we can catalog and return to at any time. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is presented by aliens with the concept that even if an event has passed or a person has died, that moment or person is still always preserved in the past and we can return there any time. The Tweets about acts of human kindness paired with fear, dread, death, in Fukushima recall Billy/Vonnegut’s recollections of Dresden, it’s citizens, it’s beauty, and it’s ultimate destruction at the hand of Allied bombers. Today we have the unfortunate business of figuring out what to do with someone’s Facebook or Twitter account when they have passed on.

 The alien Tralfamadorians also explain time in a way that feels very physical. Their perception of time is a mountain range, while the way we perceive time is akin to being strapped to a train with blinders placed on the side of your head. I find that both views sort of collide when you see people critiquing the use of communication technology today. People are going on Twitter and having conversations that would ordinarily never happen or attending webinars or catching up on the news, but the image that is popularly evoked is one of people just looking down at their phones and blind to the world.

 The internet has given us a way to realize this concept of time as a permanent thing we can look back at in a practical way, but not exactly a way that we can emotionally process. Just as triumphs and past accomplishments are posted on Facebook for friends and loved ones to look over, Twitter feuds become preserved ammunition in massive smear campaigns or at the very least it might make future conversations very awkward. But other pundits, scholars, and thinkers have extrapolated on this subject of preserving everything we do online, and it’s not like we can put the proverbial toys back in the toybox anyways. Barring some kind of cataclysm that destroys all online data as we know it, we just have to get used to having so much of our lives preserved outside the confines of our personal recollections.

“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

Of course there is always the juggling of persona that comes with having a life taking an online personality or personalities. Facebook for friends and family, Linkedin for employers, Tumblr for your artistic endeavors, Flickr for your portfolio, Twitter for making catty comments. Billy’s problem was trying to fit in place in time when no one around him can possibly understand what it’s like to constantly jump from one place to the next while also having time be constant, instead of something in the past. Nowadays folks are expected to similarly bounce around places, times, and audiences, but for each audience we have to make sure we are fully committed to our roll even though everyone else is going through the same game of digital musical chairs. Identity is not so much fleeting as it is affixed to a certain point and place. If time is a mountain range, the internet are the trading posts scattered throughout it. We are brought to a point whether we have to wonder if the Hypercity is constructed by us, or if we are the product of the Hypercity. Or is the Hypercity the ultimate crux that we are heading towards and time, place, and information become structured yet fluid? And so it goes…