And I thought 2010 was nuts.
This year was very backloaded… Did anything even happen before June? The answer is yes, but the post is long enough just covering the last five months.
Travel
Here’s where I went, that I can remember:
June
- Vinarós, Spain to see my beautiful wife, Lyla.
- London, UK to visit Nathan Matias, one of the new additions to the Center for Civic Media. During this trip I learned exactly how many awesome connections to civic folk and civic organizations a person could share in a 48-hour period. The answer is at least 8.
October
- Berlin, Germany to attend Knight-Mozilla’s #Hackcoberfest run by and attended by a whole swarm of awesome people. This was where I started on the Meta Meta Project (although, sadly, this project has since gathered a few layers of dust).
- Miami, FL to attend a Knight summit about 2012 election coverage. This was the first brainstorming summit I’ve attended and I finally got to meet Bill Adair in person. I also got to spend my birthday drinking milkshakes with incredibly inappropriate names.
November
- London, UK to attend the Mozilla Festival. At this point it was announced that I would be a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at The Boston Globe next year.
- New Jersey to see my friend Rob Muth get married.
- New York, NY to attend #factfest at CUNY. I got to meet some awesome people (for instance Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis!) and talk about fact checking and where we want technology to take it.
December
- Phoenix, AZ to attend News Foo. This was awesome. More on this in a later post. In the mean time here is as an embarrassing video of my first attempt at an Ignite talk. It is full of “Ums” but at least I have something I know I need to work on for next time.
- Washington DC to attend a fact checking summit led by the New America Foundation. This event immediately upped the quality of my thesis project by 50%, and you can read first person accounts of some of the speakers here and here on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog.
And in September, October, November, and December I also managed to sneak home to see family! That was very nice 
It also means that I have driven from Boston to Philly about seven million times this year.
Looking at this list again I realize that no, I wasn’t imagining it, I really didn’t spend much time in Boston. In December, November, and October I was only home for THREE weekends total. No wonder I wasn’t able to get anything done!
Unexpected Attention
I did manage to get some stuff done. In particular I now have a thesis project: Truth Goggles. It’s an automatic bullshit detector. I always liked the idea but I was surprised to find that a lot of others do too. As I’ve posted about before, this is where one major chunk of unexpected attention came from. The other half came from the previously mentioned Knight-Mozilla Fellowship.
It occurs to me that if the Knight Foundation didn’t exist I would probably be flipping burgers or something right now. Or at the very least being a code monkey for some evil corporation.
Reunion and Loss
This section reflects the deeper parts of my life in 2011.
Lyla came home in July, finally ending the long long Odyssey of separation. We lived through long distance during our four years of college but were expecting it to be over. Then she had to get a Fulbright and I had to get into MIT so that meant that our first year of marriage would be spent separated by an ocean. We’re glad that type of thing is over forever. We also moved to a new apartment in Arlington! This is a story of terrible landlords that deserves a post of its own.
My grandmother died. I have so many memories with her. This is the first time I lost anyone, and one of the biggest takeaways is that in so many ways nothing has changed. I still have the lessons learned, the memories of farms and fields, a love of birds and fly fishing. I still know how to pronounce asterisk (“Pretty Mary donned her skates upon the ice to frisk. Wasn’t she a silly girl her little *”), and when to say lie vs lay. I know how to play cribbage and solitaire, and how to make peanut butter fudge. I know a good pumpkin when I see one. I also know patience, love, and how to take life just seriously enough to get stuff done. I also still don’t know how she was so good at finding four leaf clovers.
Of course, all these constants makes the changes so much more noticeable. It was a bittersweet Christmas.
I do think of her often, though, and I hope that doesn’t ever stop. Lyla, Erek, and I finished watching Lord of the Rings last night and of course I kept thinking of her. They were her favorite books (she had read the epics at least seven times over the course of her life). LotR was spiritual for her, supplementing her religion. She was also one of the people in my life who provided a potential avenue for spirituality. (I’ve never been religious, but I do aspire to be spiritual. Gramma didn’t talk with us about religion much even though it was so important to her, but I know that when I’m ready, my memories of her will help).
I’m still reflecting on it all. It was really hard to speak last words to someone, but it was her choice.
And that was my 2011.
Three weeks ago I went to a happy hour organized by the Neiman Lab, I mentioned my thesis project, Andrew Phelps said “that sounds cool, can I write about it?” and I said “sure why not!” I assumed that the post would get about as much traction as professional blog posts usually get: a few hundred eyeballs and some useful feedback.
After the article was pushed it started getting twitter attention. Soon afterwards NPR, CBC, and The Register contacted me. I ended up with a two-minute piece on Weekend Edition, a longer interview on Day 6, a surprisingly balanced and long piece on TechCrunch, and the official title of Boffin by the crazy Brits. This was unexpected.
My colleague Matt Stempeck said it best: “Dan, I know that your life has been a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped up in a whole box of tsunamis this week, but you really need to start wearing pants to work.”
It turns out only part of that quote is accurate, but you’ll never know which one for sure! This is why, before I can graduate from MIT, I have to create an automated bullshit detector. The basic premise is that we, as readers, are inherently lazy. It isn’t just that we’ll believe almost anything — remember that time in 1938 when we believed aliens were invading the planet just because someone on the radio said so? Yeah. That happened. The real problem is that we’ll often believe what we want to believe (or disbelieve what we don’t want to believe).
It’s hard to blame us. Just look at the amount of information flying around every which way. Who has time to think carefully about everything? Not me, that’s who’nt. This is why I’m working on a tool called Truth Goggles that will help hone our critical abilities; one that will help us identify pieces of information that are worth inspecting a little bit more closely before deciding how it fits into our world views.
Thesis Goggles
When I wrote “before I can graduate from MIT” earlier in this post I wasn’t lying; I have decided to pursue Truth Goggles for my thesis. I’m definitely not the first person to explore this problem space but there is a lot of room to contribute. New technology has opened up new possibilities, needs have become clearer, and there is a wide variety of possible solutions and unanswered questions just sitting around waiting to be explored.
In November I presented the idea to the Media Lab community using the following slides:
The feedback I got was mixed, but what can you expect from a day called “Crit Day” which is short for “Critically Injure Pride, Hopes, and Dreams of Graduating Day.” Here were the main questions asked:
This doesn’t seem like it will scale considering Politifact only has a few thousand fact checked claims. Why aren’t you using the crowd to fact check?
My time at MIT will be spent focusing on the interface and user interaction rather than the generation and aggregation of source information. There are enough difficult questions surrounding the interaction layer. I don’t think it is worth complicating things further by trying to create a crowd-based journalism platform (which is essentially what crowd sourced fact checking amounts to).
Isn’t this just a mashup of technologies and data sets? How is what you are doing novel?
It’s true that I’m not inventing new algorithms. I’m applying existing algorithms in novel ways. Credibility layers aren’t robust right now, and they come with their own sets of interesting questions in terms of user experience and system design. My contribution will be to frame those questions, answer some of them, create a prototype, and test that prototype. This won’t be as trivial as just throwing more information on a screen and calling it a day, the interface has to be designed with care.
Do you expect to incorporate primary source data?
My initial prototype probably won’t pull from sources other than Politifact and other fact checking services, but I will definitely be thinking about ways to use other sources of data. Primary source content will eventually help with information scalability since raw footage and raw data could help computers find potentially dubious claims (and help readers make determinations about those claims).
Bullshit, This is Clearly Science Fiction
There are a lot of hard questions lurking behind corners here. In fact, most of them aren’t even trying to hide; they’re just sitting obnoxiously in the middle of the room. Some are technical, some are philosophical, but all of them need to be addressed intelligently for something like Truth Goggles to actually have a chance of working. I’ll rattle off a few of them.
- Who determines the truth? Journalists? Experts? Crowds? Individuals? Algorithms?
- Sometimes there is a right answer and sometimes there is room for debate. Can you tell which is which? How do you reflect the difference?
- How does the tool account for bias in sources?
- How does the tool account for bias in users?
- Will the system actually know enough to be regularly useful?
- This could easily just make consumers more lazy, how do you prevent that?
- What happens when the tool is wrong?
- How will this change the way people produce content?
- Where do Journalists fit into the picture?
As I’ve pondered these questions I’ve come to the following absolute conclusion: Credibility layers need to empower critical ability. I’ve also decided that it’s OK for the system to make mistakes but it is never allowed to lie. This means the interface should be less focused on telling the reader what to think and much more focused on reminding (and helping) the reader to think at times when thinking is most important.
I’ve also come up with a list of weaker claims to throw out there for discussion:
- Credibility layers don’t have to speak to everyone, but they need to empower the open minded.
- Journalists are our best bet for deep analysis and identifying truth that requires lots of time and effort (e.g. investigation and concept synthesis).
- Algorithms are our best bet for identifying contextual evidence (e.g. data, trends, and sources of sound bytes).
- Mobs can’t be trusted to decide what is true and false, but they are the key to figuring out what is worth thinking about.
Over the coming months I’ll be cranking out interfaces, prototypes, and eventually some good old fashioned boring academic papers about this idea. In the mean time if you’re interested in Truth Goggles I’ll be trying to post updates as regularly as possible on my blog, on twitter (@slifty), and eventually on the newly registered truthgoggl.es.
This post was written as part of a course called Introduction to Civic Media.
I feel odd writing too many separate posts in one day. My solution is a merger: the post on Anonymous and Hacktivism is going to buy out my project update. The terms of the buyout haven’t been made public but money has already exchanged hands between the 1% so there is no going back.
Part 1: Anonymous
My stalking of Anonymous and 4chan has always been an equal blend of scientific, hilarious, and disturbing. I pay just enough attention to know what’s going on, but not enough to actually be part of the community. Life is a lot better when you don’t visit 4chan. Of course, I can’t help the fact that the entire culture is absolutely fascinating.
Not to be hipster or anything, but I wrote about Anonymous before it was cool in the age of protesting Scientology. If you are curious about how anon functions as a hive mind then I highly suggest clicking that link, not to read the article but to read the comments.
This one, in particular, summarizes a significant portion of the Anonymous mentality: “one thing you may not understand about us, is our drive. We all crave one thing, the lulz. That which produces the highest amount of said lulz will be where our efforts go into. Any real anon will fight for the death for the lulz and the creation of more lulz. We are a hive minded organization that can be described as chaotic neutral. In lulz we trust.”
Looking back at this (and spending 20 minutes on 4chan along with the rest of the class last week) reminded me that all of the mainstream coverage of Anonymous often misses this aspect of the core personality. If Anonymous were a Shakespearian character it would be Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Think that everyone at 4chan would be mad at pepper spray cop? Absolutely not, his actions upset lots of people – a very potent form of lulz indeed.
I need to be more careful, of course, when trying to describe something as complicated as Anonymous. It isn’t an organization, it is a collective, which means trying to pin down a single motivation is a fruitless effort. To be sure there are more things that drive the group than laughs. Freedom of information, for instance (which is part of what set off the initial rebellion against Scientology — taking down that tom cruise video was both an attack on lulz AND an attack on information freedom).
Anon aside, last week’s readings opened up my eyes to the much longer history of digital disruption. Who knew that people used digital tools to cause collective trouble before 4chan? Not me, that’s for sure.
Part 2: Page One Remix
As for my project (a system designed to make it easy to re-mix and share the front page of the new york times), I have a few updates. I’ve forked, cloned, diced, and spliced Hackasaurus – a tool that is designed to help non-techies better understand how web pages work by making it easy to modify the code under the hood on the fly. They even have a built in sharing mechanism!
So far I have focused on changing the interface and interaction side of things. I made modifications to put less emphasis on “learning HTML” and more emphasis on remixing. This meant stripping talk of HTML tags, simplifying interactions where possible, and making it a bit easier to trigger the editing window (on the original tool you had to hover over an element and type “r.” On my tool clicking the element will do the trick).
The next step is to match some of the styling of the New York Times. Once that is done I’ll set up my own version of the sharing and boom! Tool complete and anyone can create their own news!
Once the technical side is complete (which will happen over the next few days) I’ll get crackalackin’ on the associated write-up. Here is the world premiere of the planned sections:
- Tool Introduction (Explaining the concept)
- Previous Remix Cultures (YTMND, 4Chan)
- Previous News Remixes (Yes Men, Others?)
- Page One Remix Overview (Description of the tool and how it works)
- Plans and Future Work (What I hope the tool will enable and how to add to it)
As we all know the most important part of any successful project is completely changing your idea at the last minute. In that spirit I am about to present a progress update on a project that has nothing to do with the revamped IRC interface I outlined last time (note that the IRC project isn’t dead, but I’ll be working on it over IAP instead).
Here’s my new plan: I am going to make it possible for anyone to control the content of front page of the New York Times. Want your kid’s little league game in the local news? That’s cool, but you know what’s cooler? Having your kid’s fame story smack dab front and center next to the article about Osama Bin Laden’s assassination. Suddenly little Billy is the talk of more than just the town, he’s the talk of the entire world!
Interested? Well hang onto your hats because I’m about to teleport to a completely different topic.
How to Manipulate the Masses: A Simple Guidebook
People say the Internet is liberating and I suppose that can be true; however, as a wise man named Ethan Zuckerman once said, it isn’t enough to have a voice. What you really need is an audience. For the average digital Joe or Janet that audience is probably something between zero and maybe a few thousand people. If you didn’t realize it from that last sentence I’m saying your audience is smaller than a colony of ants. Hell, what you have isn’t even captive, so good luck getting more than a few minutes of collective attention across your entire network in a given day!
How does it feel to know that your personal media power quotient, even with access to the latest and greatest forms of communication in all of human history, is pretty close to zilch? Feels bad, right? Kind of makes you not want to bother trying to do anything at all?
Well suck it up because you aren’t alone. In fact, “you aren’t alone” is exactly why so many grassroots messages have spread in a land of noise and tweets: they go viral. If everyone gets two minutes of daily attention from a network then the only way for to spread a message is to hijack your network’s airtime too. More importantly, you have to do so in a way that equips all of those people to hijack THEIR networks too.
You can get your network to share by either:
- Pushing something that they will agree with (curse you filter bubble.)
- Pushing something that is amazing
- Pushing something that is hilarious
- Cats
Keep in mind that comments on your content will do almost nothing for spreading messages beyond one network step, which is why “pushing something that will piss them off” isn’t on the list. “Cats” is a placeholder for the type of content that, as of now, is the only way to get to consistently get a network’s network to share.
Anyone who was holding a hat can let go now because I’m going to talk about my project again. For those who didn’t care before but whose interested has piqued now it’s your turn to hat hold. For everyone else, why are you still reading this?
Taming the Meme
I met Ben Huh, the owner of ICanHasCheebzburger.com, last week at a 2012 election coverage summit. If that sentence meant nothing to you, I’m basically saying I met a viral god. The nearby newsfolk peppered him with questions about how to use memes to spread their own messages. His response was simple: you probably can’t. It is so difficult to harness a meme because they come from a digital version of whisper down the lane (or “Telephone” if you’re from that other part of the country). People add twists, there is no central control, and this is almost tautologically part of why the thing becomes popular to begin with.
Memes spread because they easy to shape, which is how people can use them in ways that are exciting enough to share. Boom, viral content achieved
My proposed system is one that will hijack an existing tool to make it easy to twist and turn the front page of the New York Times, to share those twists with a network, and to have members of that network add (and share) further twists of their own. I also want this system to track the changes; I want to build a conversation around the evolution of a given strain of modifications. I would even like to help incorporate some real content into the picture since I have the real estate; maybe some actual news can slip or fade its way in sometimes.
The end result is more than a simple stage for content sharing. Through very minor forms of control (in the form of history and tracking and known context) it becomes possible to infuse the adapting content with useful information layers. Boom, meaningful viral content achieved.
Oh, and for the record, remix-and-share services do exist (consider Startup Spirit vs Citrus Flavoring) but they are systems designed to provide a technology. I’m proposing a system designed to empower viral conversations.
This has been cross posted on the civic blog.
I love IRC and you should too. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was the new hotness over 9000 years ago and it is still just as spectacular today! Like I always say, however, if it isn’t broke, break it. That’s right, I want to change the way people interface with this group chat behemoth for my final project. Before I get into what I mean you need to know a bit about what IRC actually is. Before I get into THAT, though, you need to know a few things that IRC absolutely is not.
What IRC Isn’t
- IRC is not GChat.
- IRC is not AIM or any other version of IM.
- IRC is not Google Hangouts.
- IRC is not Facebook chat.
I can’t stress those points enough because it is easy to look at IRC on a high level and say “oh, so it’s [insert any of the above items here]” and you would be totally and completely wrong. The reason you would be wrong is quite subtle but it comes down to the fact that IRC is a real time community platform that lets people idle 24/7 without making them feel the need to say anything at all. Imagine someone staring at you in a google hangout for 3 hours breathing heavily through their mouth while you’re casually talking to your friend without it feeling awkward for anyone involved and you’re at least a LITTLE closer to imagining IRC.
Still confused? Here are some more vague explanations and metaphors, maybe one will stick.
What IRC Is
- IRC is a platform that allows communities to create a network of persistent chat rooms where people come and go throughout the day.
- IRC is the digital equivalent of pubs.
- IRC is how I learned about the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, before the news was broken by 24/7 outlets like CNN, from some online friends in Europe (that’s right, I got my real time news from social media before it was cool).
- IRC does something that is still missing from other popular digital tools: it provides a space for real time, casual, group communication.
The ONLY Two Flaws
Clearly I’ll have to write IRC a love letter some day on my personal blog (spoiler alert, it will end with a hilarious pun about how IRC and I need to just get a room). But here’s the thing: IRC isn’t always the best thing since sliced HTTP. IRC chat rooms are often either noisy as hell or quiet as a graveyard.
There are technological solutions already for the silence issue in the form of IRC clients that realize how lurking works (i.e. they strike a balance by alerting you of activity without being way too “in your face.”) That way you can just keep IRC on in the background even when doing work and get little non-obnoxious notices during the rare moments where there are actually conversations going on. Thus a relatively inactive channel is never actually dead so long as there are people still willing to run a client in the background.
The noise situation, however, could use some some good solutions. You can quickly learn why by spending any amount of time in a popular channel on a popular network (for instance #occupywallst on freenode). There are just too many conversations between too many people about too many topics all happening way too fast. How can we solve it? With the glories of modern technology and re-invented interaction design of course! Besides, any healthy relationship needs one entity to try to change everything about how the other one looks and acts.
If you have used any chat service you know the basics of IRC: you type a message, you hit enter, your message appears at the bottom of the conversation, and in the end you have a transcript just like you would read from a court hearing (I suspect, I’ve never been to court so I can’t be sure). For my project in Introduction to Civic Media I want to use Linkinus (a spectacular IRC client for OSX) to completely re-think the IRC chat interface. Linkinus renders IRC using the same technology that powers web browsers AND it opens the hood to let you write custom skins. This means I can use Javascript to render whatever I want, and possibly even tie into more immersive APIs that can do things like natural language processing to build up webs of conversations on the fly.
Now if only I was good at design… Meh, how hard can it be!
Last. Week. Was. Awesome.
I just got back from a trip to Berlin as part of the Knight-Mozilla learning lab (MoJo). Twenty of the participants from the previous round (the month long lecture series) were invited to spend a week in Germany getting to know each other while attempting to churn out some code for the rest of the world to see.
I arrived Sunday morning and quickly learned why it is never a good idea to get to a country before hotel check in. No recovery naps for me! The first thing I did was meet up with Saleem Kahn, Nicola Hughes, and Laurian Gridinoc and take a trip to the Bauhaus where I learned that people have been making things for a long, long time.
——–
Let me pause to quickly explain. I grew up, like most of you, using lots of things. When it came to making I was stuck with Legos and the like until one day I discovered programming and started making digital things with that. Fast forward 15 years and I’m at MIT taking How to Make Almost Anything and I say “oh awesome! Hardware isn’t just magic!” But once the course ended I, for the most part, reverted back to my comfort zone of software (still empowered with the potential to carve out circuits and molds, but not seizing immediate opportunities to utilize that empowerment just yet).
Bauhaus is the rest of the picture and got me excited about making again. The series of shops (I attended the one in Berlin) which closed with the rise of the Nazis, were basically buildings dedicated to modernist design (i.e. creating objects that are both beautiful and functional). As I walked around the museum I realized that I don’t have to make things that are super high tech and based on circuits to be making almost anything, I just have to be making things with a unique purpose. Hackable life for the win!
No time to worry about making things now (sponsor week and thesis proposal deadlines are looming), but I sure am ready to build stuff instead of buying stuff.
——–
After Bauhaus we went back to the hotel and I crashed and burned (and woke up just in time to meet up with Mark Boas and have some good old fashioned German Asian food since most things were closing up by then!).
The next morning was the beginning of what ended up being an INCREDIBLY packed four-day schedule of programming, talking, eating, walking, and sleeping. The hackathon (a term used to refer to these kinds of get togethers where people sit around and code) itself took place in a building called the Betahaus, located in Moritzplatz (aka “Makerplatz” since it is the hub of Berlin’s Maker community). The room was awesome – the fourth floor of a stark concrete building, full of tables, chairs, soda, lots and lots of wifi, and random posters of wildlife on the walls. Now that I think about it I wouldn’t be surprised if they hosted fight clubs on weeknights.
As the 20 of us pondered statements like “nothing should be anything” we started milling around and getting to know one another. Some people were designers, some were journalists, some were hackers, and some were mutts but sure enough project clusters slowly sprung up and by the second day people were nose deep in their laptops.
It was around this time that I realized that my project shared a very common need with most of the others: the need for metadata extraction from pieces of media! Thus was born the Meta Meta Project.
——–
I’ll write more about Meta Meta in another post somewhere on the Internet, but the basic idea is that there are a lot of tools out there which can extract information from images, videos, and text. For instance maybe you want to know all of the locations mentioned in a news article, or maybe you want to find all the words that appear in an image.
A lot of projects would benefit greatly from having access to this information, but to use the tools out there takes a fair amount of time setting up, implementing logic, and generally re-inventing parts of the wheel. Rather than having everyone need to become an expert in the tools, the Meta Meta Project is an API suite which will make it dead simple to put in a piece of media and get back the information you want.
Like I said, I’ll have to post more on that somewhere else.
——–
By day 3 the news partners arrived – there were representatives from BBC, The Guardian, Zeit Online, Al Jazeera, and The Boston Globe. They were there to get to know our work and us, but more importantly they were there to get to know one another. The idea of open collaboration still seems to be a somewhat foreign concept among the professional news industry. This is a pity because there is surely a lot of room for mutual benefit and it would surely free up lots of resources for one another. (Hey news rooms! Hop on board the Meta Meta Project!)
There is so much more to write about but there is so little time so I’m going to wrap up with some quick points:
- I had never attended a hackathon before this one and I’m now totally hooked.
- I had never attended a Mozilla event before and I’m now totally hooked.
- Berlin, and Germany in general, is a surreal place to be. The whole city is marked with the painful memories of the past, and it is just so interesting and tragically beautiful to walk around and see memorials, broken pieces of walls, and intentional marks designed to ensure that things aren’t forgotten.
- I came to realize that America isn’t really as young as everyone makes it out to be. When you think about how both Germany and Spain have had radical change in government in the past century it’s almost as if they’re the newbies.
- Germany pulls off maker punks.
I want to end with my favorite memory from the trip (I stuck around for three days after the coding portion just to see the city). A small group of fellow stragglers and I were wandering around a part of Berlin that I would never wander around on my own. This was by no means a place for tourists. As we passed by doorways of punk clubs blasting out dance music we crossed a well-lit alley blasting a different kind of music. At the other end of the alley was a small band with a gathering crowd behind it. No vocals, just tones, and the energy slowly built. We got caught in the sounds and just watched as they wailed away and eventually climaxed.
In the words of Chris Keller: if someone did that in Manhattan they would probably be carted away.
The Explanation
Summer is coming to a close and Hurricanes are coming into town so I decided that it was time to finally install the new version of Mac’s OSX (Lion). I don’t believe in upgrades, so this meant reformatting and installing everything fresh and new. Totally worth it trust me…
Anyway, Mac OSX had this great thing called “Spaces” which were virtual desktops on the computer. This meant that even if I had just one monitor I could pretend to have a whole bunch more — instead of having just one screen, I could have a bunch of fake screens that I could switch between using the keyboard or the touch pad. Maybe screen #1 would be for chatting, screen #2 for browsing the web, and screen #3 for actually getting things done. Moving around between these desktops was easy and made multitasking much more streamlined.
I was a screen power user, and in the old version of OSX (called Snow Leopard) I had a 4×4 grid of screens (that’s 16 separate desktops). The upper left hand corner was for to do lists and productivity organization, the right hand column was for various forms of communication, and the center four desktops were my workspace where I would program and browse the web. When I was in the middle block I could switch to up to four different desktops (up, right, left, or down) with just one keystroke.
OSX Lion put all that to an end. They replaced the old Screens with a thing called Mission Control. Mission control is cool too, and it still supports multiple screens, and you can still have up to 16, but you can’t have them in a grid anymore — they are all in a straight line. Lame! This means that from any given screen you have easy access to only TWO others (left and right).
Well, that’s the downside. The upside is now you have 16 freaking screens in a LINE! And each one can have it’s own wallpaper. This opens up the doors for… MEGAPAPERS!
The Good Stuff
Megapapers are like desktop backgrounds / wallpapers, except instead of being one image they are 16 images. This would work for huge panoramas, or maybe you want your wallpaper to represent the purpose of a screen, or each one could have a different phrase. Or… you could relive your childhood by taking a map from Super Mario World and stitching the entire thing together!
That’s what I did.
Took a rainy day but it is done! Here’s a video of the final result:
I’m not a graphic designer, but I did my best (paralax in SMW is no fun.) Suggestions are welcome. If you want the untextured assets just let me know (Twitter handle @slifty). Also I think I’ll want to make a few more of these, so if you have any favorite games / ideas for things that would be epic please say so in the comments!
Download the Megapaper!
^ Click to download this mofo
Individual Images
NOTE: Super Mario World is a game by Nintendo. They own the IP and the TM and CR and all that jazz.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Prototype and Development Plan
The Good News: I created a proof of concept prototype of the ATTN-SPAN platform powered by the Metavid project.
The Bad News: Metavid is having a lot of stability issues right now, so you probably won’t be able to use my prototype. I made a screen cast just in case.
Relying on a 3rd party for the most important aspect of an application is a major risk; one that I must mitigate. This brings me to my first batch of design work: the content scraper.
Scraping, Slicing, and Scrubbing C-SPAN
How do you get from a TV channel to a rich video archive and how do you get there automatically? The goal is to convert C-SPAN into a series of overlapping video segments that are identified in terms of state, politician, topic, party, action, and legislative item. Some of this is straightforward and some of it might be impossible, but here’s an overview of the planned nuts and bolts:
- DirecTV offers TV content in a format that is easy to record digitally and VLC is a free tool that can do that recording. Combine the two and we can download C-SPAN streams into individual files that are primed and ready for analysis.
- Once a video file is in our clutches we can use VLC once again to separate out the video from the Closed Captioning transcript.
- Now we have a transcript and a raw video file. Next we register all of this information (in a database) so that we can look it all up later, and then convert the video file in to streaming-friendly formats and store it alongside the original recording.
- C-SPAN consistently shows a graphic on the bottom of the screen that says who is talking, their state, their party, and what is being debated. By using a technique called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) we can pull this text out of the video image. Once pulled, we can add that to our database so that we can access all of this information for any moment in the video.
- At this point we have most of the information we need, but there is still room for fine tuning. We can use audio levels and the closed captioning transcripts to try to identify moments of inactivity, normal dialogue, and heated dialogue.
These steps are enough to split up and categorize C-SPAN footage into an organized video database, but there are still more ways to flag special moments in the footage. For example, we may want to identify changes in speaker emotion in order to give our algorithms the ability to craft more engaging episodes. This is possible through the work of Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab, a group which has developed several tools that perform emotional analysis using facial recognition.
We may also want to identify specific legislative action (e.g. “calling a vote”). This could be accomplished by looking for key words in the transcript (e.g. “call a vote”) and possibly through common patterns in the audio signal (maybe there are identifiable sounds, such as a gavel hitting the table). Both of these concepts require additional research.
Creating a Profile and Constructing an Episode
If video events are the building blocks then viewer interests are the glue. The creation of a personalized episode requires two things: A user account, and a context. The user account provides general information like where you live, what issues you have identified as important, and (if you are willing to connect with Twitter or Facebook) what issues your circles have been discussing lately.
The context comes from time and cyberspace. Every night, after congress closes their gates, your profile is used to create a short, rich video experience designed to contain as much relevant content from that day as possible. At this point you might get an email begging you to watch, or maybe you log in on your own because you are addicted to badges and points and you want as much ATTN-SPAN karma as you can get.
There is another way to access this content though, and that is through the web sites you visit anyway. Imagine if you could read an article about the National Debt on the New York Times (or in a chain email) and actually see quotes from your own senators in the report. What if you could supplement the national report with a video widget that lets you browse what your house members had to say when they controlled the floor during the debt debates.
From a technical perspective this isn’t that far fetched. Truth Goggles, one of my other projects, is a bookmarklet that will analyze the web page you are viewing, fact check it, and rewrite the content to highlight truths and lies. This impossible feat is fairly similar to what I’m proposing here.
Adding Rich Information
Once an episode is pieced together we can look up the information surrounding the video to know who is talking and what they are talking about. What else can be added and how do we get it? Existing APIs offer some good options:
- Contact Information – Thanks to the Sunlight Labs Congress API it is possible to get the contact information for any member of congress on the fly. Thanks to VOIP services it is possible to create web-based hooks to call those people with the click of a button.
- Campaign Contributions – The New York Times offers a Campaign Finance API which can help you understand where the person on screen gets his or her money.
- Voting Records – The New York Times also offers a Congress API that will make it possible to know vote outcomes from related bills as well as information about the active speaker’s voting records.
- Truth and Lie Identification – My Truth Goggles project can be easily adapted to work with snippets from video transcripts. This will allow ATTN-SPAN to take advantage of fact checking services like PolitiFact and NewsTrust.
This is a good start, but I would also like to show links to related news coverage and create socially driven events based on community sentiment (for instance to track moments that caused people to get upset or happy). This won’t come for free, but it should be accessible given the right interface design.
Part 3: A Note to the Newsies
So that’s the idea and the plan. What’s the value?
It seems plausible that ATTN-SPAN, a system that analyzes primary source footage and pulls out any content that is related to a particular beat could be useful as a reporters tool, but what about your subscribers? ATTN-SPAN can augment an individual article so that it hits everybody close to home. Suddenly one article becomes as effective as two dozen. Moving past text, for larger organizations with a significant amount video footage ATTN-SPAN can be tweaked to use your programming instead of (or in addition to) C-SPAN.
At this point I have to warn you that this is not the first nor will it be the last project to work with C-SPAN. A 2003 demo out of the Media Lab used C-SPAN as one of several sources of information in a platform aimed to provide citizens with Total Government Awareness. Metavid, the platform I used in my initial prototype, already makes C-SPAN more accessible by enabling searches and filters. The list surely goes on.
So why is this a more powerful project? Well, the real goal of ATTN-SPAN isn’t to get more people watching C-SPAN. In fact I tricked you: this project isn’t about government awareness at all. It’s actually part of an effort to make indisputable fact (“blunt reality” and “primary source footage”) a more prominent part of the media experience without requiring additional effort from the audience. Newsrooms do an amazing job of reporting events and providing insight, but for deeper stories there simply isn’t enough time or money to cover everybody’s niche without going beyond the average person’s attention span.
Thus ends my pitch.
The code for both prototypes mentioned in this post can be found on github: ATTN-SPAN and Truth Goggles. Please forgive any dirty hacks. I would be thrilled if anybody wants to offer suggestions or even collaborate. On that note, please get in touch on Twitter @slifty.
Oh debt limit! Those rascals in United States congress were at it again. At least that’s what I was told by CNN. In reality most of what I know about the whole issue has come from about four source types: blog posts shared by friends, anonymous info graphics, national media outlets, and conversations with people who get their information from these three things. As a result I have a vague idea about what went on, but since my senators didn’t do anything particularly crazy like walk around naked on the debate floor or challenge each other to a dual I get no knowledge of the thing that matters most: my personally elected representatives.
After the legislation was passed I saw a poll on CNN’s front page that I can only assume was a blatant taunt to drive this horrible situation home. The poll read something along the lines of “How satisfied are you with the actions of your elected representatives?” To which I responded by clenching my fists and screaming to the sky: “How the hell should I know?”
Of course I realize this is nobody’s fault. I realize this especially after listening to Mohamed Nanabhay describe the work and challenges faced by the journalists at Al Jazeera. The professionals manning the ships of media corporations must face countless unsolvable challenges involving what content to air, how to craft a message, and how to share information across many diverse communities in a way that makes sense.
ATTN-SPAN is my hopeful attempt to have my cake and eat it too. Don’t let MoJo or MIT fool you: I’m making it for myself. The idea behind this project is that most content out there is a product that was created for the masses – not for me. I can find algorithms and editors that try to pick out articles written for masses that are similar to me, but ultimately those articles are still written for masses. My theory is that the only way to get true personalization is at the source. The primary source.
The reason nobody likes primary sources is that they are a really inefficient way to transfer information. The irrelevant-to-information ratio is simply too high. Worse. The boring-to-anything ratio is too high. I mean seriously, who watches C-SPAN? But what if that primary source can be tagged, catalogued, and marked up in a way that will help generate digestible content on an individual level?
Once the footage of congress can be automatically organized in terms of not just things like who is talking and what is being discussed, but also in terms of when voices get louder or when gavels hit the table… Well, suddenly primary sources can be patched together completely dynamically in a way that tells a story just for you. Your information diet can be augmented with personalized, real world footage. Finally you’ll know for sure that your senator is just as ineffective as you had previously assumed!
