roomthily

robertogreco:

The London Perambulator is full length documentary by John Rogers.

John Rogers’ film looks at the city we deny and the future city that awaits us. Leading London writers and cultural commentators Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Russell Brand explore the importance of the liminal spaces at the city’s fringe, its Edgelands, through the work of enigmatic and downright eccentric writer and researcher Nick Papadimitriou - a man whose life is dedicated to exploring and archiving areas beyond the permitted territories of the high street, the retail park, the suburban walkways.

The ideas of psychogeography and Nick’s own deep topography are also explored.

(via David Smith)

infoneer-pulse:

Visualizing Historical Data, And The Rise Of “Digital Humanities”

A more traditional historian setting out to write about railroads in America would spend years immersed in archives, assimilating data, but principally looking for the anecdotes, characters, and grand narratives that make the story tellable. There will always be a place for such history. But White’s approach uses novel methods to open up new ways of telling history. White and his assistants went to the same sources as a traditional historian would have—letters, freight tables, books, newspapers, accident reports, ledgers, and so on. Only, when something seemed too complex, he didn’t cast it aside. He entered it into a database, and georeferenced it with ArcGIS, geographic information system software.

“We use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), spatial analysis, and visualization graphical representation algorithms to visually manipulate maps and graphs,” the team reports on its site. And as a result, the team could ask questions that wouldn’t be possible with analog historical tools: “Which stretches of rail were the most dangerous? Was one railroad profession more at risk of death or injury than another? How did the railroads affect settlement in the counties immediately adjacent to the railroads? What happens to these populations over time as more transportation and irrigation options became available?”

» via Fast Company

Atlas of the Habitual (via)

This atlas is a catalog of my experiences over 200 days. It is a realistic self portrait of my everyday habits and developing routine, piecing together my life action by action, map by map.

[…]

This atlas exists to digitize my everyday movements, to create a personal dataset and start to explore how that information can be used. The questions then arise: How best to parse and present this information? What constraints were followed?

For this atlas, categories were generated based on different aspects of my life and public data I found about the location. The dataset was used to recount memories, actions and interactions I had in my current residence of Bennington, Vermont, USA. This data can be presented in a virtually unlimited number of ways, depending on what one wanted to do with the data. Although the information holds great value to the individual, it could also be seen as a commodity.

Comob was developed as a research tool to explore social and spatial relationships between people in motion. 

As a tool for discussion comob allowed people to reflect on their individual perceptions of the place and the pollution in the action of mapping it. By seeing how each other were working and how far people were going participants questioned their own decisions. Were they sensing the same thing? Had they made different assumptions about what constitutes a boundary? How is it possible to map something that has temporal fluctuations?

by CoMob