Hardey, M. (2007). The city in the age of web 2.0 a new synergistic relationship between place and people. Information, Communication & Society, 10(6):867 – 884.

In this paper Michael Hardey examines how the development of Web 2.0 resources is providing new ways of seeing, experiencing and understanding the city. A particular focus is on the increasing role of user-generated geolocational data and the opportunities this affords to reimagine and experience the metropolis with mobile technologies acting as a conduit. It considers the raise of ‘citizen media’ and ‘new cartography’ as ways to map and visualize the city through images and narrative descriptions. These new services of the city might help people base a decision about whether or not to move home. It could be informing long-term choices such as deciding where to live or what school children should attend, and the more everyday such as which park or shop to visit may be shaped by a mesh of user-generated and other data.

Michael Hardey describes this emergence of digital traces in the city and the feedback loop they generate as follow:

As Sheller and Urry (2003) observe, ‘individuals increasingly exist beyond their private bodies. Persons leave traces of their selves in informational space, and can be more readily mobile through space’ (p. 116). Indeed users of social networking sites may always be immersed within them, as they and others are dynamically geolocated. This marks the emergence of new ways of experiencing and living in the city as people make nuanced choices about places to avoid, visit, live or work. Such choices can be increasingly fleeting, unplanned and dynamic as mobile technologies deliver personalized data about places and people. There is a potential rapid feedback loop here as locations in the city may experience sudden flows of visitors or customers as people follow lines of information or seek the presence of those from their social networks.

Relation to my thesis: This text consolidates well the claims supported so far in Tracing the Visitor’s Eye. However, I am rather dubious about the wisdom of citizen media to support decision making in the city. As explained in I rather believe in the richness of implicit traces people leave in using web 2.0 and mobile systems to understand the city and places as expressed in Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design

Via Anne Galloway.

Crang, M. and Graham, S. (2007). SEntient cities ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space. Information, Communication & Society, 10(6):789–817.

Mike Crang and Stephen Graham deliver a “British cultural geography” approach (see also Dodge and Kitchin’s Code/Space) to urban ubiquitous computing far from the contemporary techno-determinism and well attuned to socio-cultural nuances and the variety and complexity of everyday lived experience (see Concepts That Go Against the Technological Tide in Social, Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing). In this article, they explore domains within which the reconfiguration of cities and their politics are being actively imagined and enacted through the imagination and deployment of ubiquitous computing. Through a wide-ranging survey they emphasize that there is a great deal of work going on developing and exploring urban pervasive in three main domains: “commercial fantasies of ‘friction-free’ urban consumption; military and security industry attempts to mobilize ubiquitous computing for the ‘war on terror’; and attempts by artists to interrupt fantasies of perfect urban control through artistic use of new ubicomp technologies to try and re-enchant urban space and urban life.” Strangely enough, I do not really understand why research endeavors to explore urban informatics are not discussed (such as investigating the significance of digital traces, use of urban probes, study of the co-evolution

They categorize the latter domain (digital art and locative media) into three main types of initiatives:

• The first take the data coding of the environment and seek to make it transparent and/or aesthetically problematic.
• The second are those that seek to re-enchant the environment through multi-authored overcodings. That is they take augmented space but seek to pluralize the authorship.
• The third are those that seek to foster new engagements with the environment by promoting new practices of direct contact and association

The critique of a possible future of the perfect, uniform informational landscape and the fantasies of ‘friction free’ urban consumption matches very well with the message of Sliding Friction. They refere to Michel de Certeau:

His nightmare city was one of perfect knowledge and transparency where terror is no longer about the shadows but ‘an implacable light that produces this urban text without obscurities, which is created by a technocratic power everywhere and which puts the city-dweller under control.
[…]
Far from the pure vision of what de Certeau calls the ‘concept city’, we may find the production of myriads of little stories – a messy infinity of ‘Little Brothers’ rather than one omniscient ‘Big’ Brother

and Malcoml McCullough’s Digital Ground

In practice, we may find that temporary and ‘good-enough’ approaches to urban ubicomp may lead to ‘local aggregations of self-connecting systems [that] can become islands of coherence in the chaos raised by pervasive computing’.

It matches also quiet well with what I attended to communicate at Lift07 in Embracing the Real World’s Messiness.

But they are only mythologies of a perfect, uniform informational landscape. In reality, the seamless and ubiquitous process of pure urban transparency that many accounts suggest will always be little but a fantasy. In practice, the linking of many layers of computerized technology is generally a ‘kludge’, as software designers call it. That is, a bricolage of component middleware, none of which is really designed for the task to which it is put, nor perfectly configured to work with the other middleware or devices it encounters. Computerized systems thus run ‘sub-optimally’ but normally function adequately nonetheless.
[…]
There is a real issue about proliferating knowledges circulating routinely and more or less autonomously of people. But it would seem to us that the political options are not those of rejection or romanticizing notions of disconnection. Rather, it is to work through the inevitable granularity and gaps within these systems, to find the new shadows and opacities that they produce.

And finally I share the same discourse whenever I have to answer the “Big Brother” question for Tracing the Visitor’s Eye:

As such, there may well be an issue where rendering our tacit sociospatial practices visible is an uncomfortably close echo of commodified and surveillant systems. But these artistic endeavours in turn offer a second politics of visibility, that is these technologies themselves need to be made visible.

Two projects mapping the predicted real-time positions of trains. Since train operators do not disclose the actual location of a train, these services must use indirect ways to collect these data. Where Are Trains (France) parses online schedule boards of different stations such as the one of Paris Montparnasse. The position of the train obtained in real-time upon Arrivals and with at least a 1-h delay for departures. Then the system uses pre-builded time profiles to estimate the current location of trains by-passing potential stopovers. Similarly Train Map (Switzerland) uses train timetable, and does not yet show the actual GPS-positions of the trains. “But, as Swiss trains are almost always on time, most of the time the position is accurate”.

Tracking a train in Zürich with Train Map.
Relation to my thesis: The predictive approach used in this systems generates uncertain data that determine a location in space (where is it) and time (when was it there). Does the temporal granularity of these location information affects the decision making? In what kind of scenario would people rely on these informations

Mapping real-time train traffic follows the trend of vessel tracking (e.g. planes and boats)

Fantastic post by Dan Hill sketching and discussing in “The street as platform” the near-future implications of the digitization of the city with technologies embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the streets, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. “It’s still remarkable to even sketchily consider how much data is already around us, and is near-invisible to traditional urban planning perspectives“.

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Inspired by Archigram, who suggested that “When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain”, the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. For instance, holes in data may become more relevant than the pothole in the pavement.

The narrative describes many aspects of the digital city I have been touching: digital traces, revealing the invisible, seamfulness, and user adoption. Unusually for this type of exercise describing the street of the future, Dan mentions the possibility to better inform the practice of post-occupancy evaluations:

At another building on the street, a new four-storey commercial office block inhabited by five different companies, the building information modelling systems, left running after construction, convey real-time performance data on the building’s heating, plumbing, lighting and electrical systems back to the facilities management database operated by the company responsible for running and servicing the building. It also triggers entries in the database of both the architect and engineering firms who designed and built the office block, and are running post-occupancy evaluations on the building in order to learn from its performance once inhabited.

Relation to my thesis: Quality in the data, citizens appropriation of the technologies in the cities, the temporality of the space and the data defining it:

Her phone’s Google Maps application triangulates her position to within a few hundred metres using the mobile cell that encompasses the street, conveying a quicker route to the café. Unfortunately, none of their systems convey that the café is newly closed for redecoration.

Back from Florence, where I presented to the local officials and the press (comunicato di stampa), an in-progress report of the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project (slides for the 1-hour press conference). Feedbacks have been rather positive. Interestingly, some journalists linked this work to stories that have been in the local news lately. Could the results presented help move the David statue or better understand the impact of the implementation of low-cost (new Ryanair routes to Pisa sold to travelers as if they were flying to Florence). A relevant point raised during the day was that these data could not only help the understanding of tourist movements in Florence, but also compare with the competing cities in a national (competition with Venezia and Pisa) and global levels (how are tourists of Florence different from the other cities?). In that context, future effort will aim at defining the profiles of Flickr users and matching their different behaviors in the top 20 tourist cities.

The perks of this project: 24 hours in Florence.

In the media:

• Il turista fa clic e si svela
• Il Mit di Boston studia la vita dei turisti di Firenze
• Turismo: Primo studio del’MIT’ su vita turisti a Firenze
• Firenze tra le città più fotografate al mondo
• Turismo, il MIT di Boston attraverso le foto ricostruisce gusti et iteneratir dei visitatori
• Turismo: Firenze e Roma le più fotografate
• Turismo: per il Mit è Firenze la città più fotografata d’Italia

Relation to my thesis: Slightly leaving the pure aademic tracks, it is a peculiar exercise confront research to people that finance it (*sigh* the quest of the relevance…). More than presenting results, the message I intended to communicate was about the seriousness and potentials of people-generated location information and digital traces (partially inspired by Bruno Latour).

My visit of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, allowed be to exchange with some of the finest researchers active on the edges of CSCW and ubicomp including: Steve Benford (we discussed the potential uses of “trails” to reveal the “wrong” behaviors, replay is often a request of participants of pervasive experiences, but also the challenges to raise the credibility of HCI research in the industry), Martin Flintham (developing and deploying pervasive experiences), Leif Oppermann (uncertainty visualization and tools to develop pervasive experiences), Holger Schnädelbach (evaluation in architecture and hybrid worlds, presentation of cospaces), Stefan Egglestone (feedback look with bio sensors, stress sensing, see telemetry in theme parcs), and Adriano Galati (delay tolerant ad-hoc networks).

In the effort to build more coherence in my research focus, I took the opportunity to present my work and try to highlight and test the key evidences that emerged from my first studies. In the discussion after my talk, Leif Oppermann and Chris Greenhalgh suggested that, in the light of the outcomes of CatchBob! I should have a closer look on how people who atomize the georeferencing of their photos. Do they follow the same practice as in CatchBob! (i.e. become more passive in disclosing the location information, do they “annotate”/communicate less as well?

Last Wednesday, I gave a 20min brownbag talk at the giCentre at the City University in London. The presentation was divided in several parts. First, I define the shortcomings in location-aware computing and their consequences that generate a socio-technical gap. I continued by highlighted that the problems do not necessarily lay in the immaturity of technologies, but also in the failure to match people’s own perception of space (granularity, multiple-spaces). Then I detailed the evidences of this gap from my studies and observations of the appropriation of location-aware applications (CatchBob! and Satnav in Taxi). That lead me to describe an approach that leverages digital traces to tailor location information and define user’s the area of attention and their perception of area of influence of points of interest. In that context, I described the Tracing the visitor’s eye project and briefly introduced the context of future experiments (WikiCity and the Wireless City). The slides are online (5.5MB).

The presentation generated lively exchanges with Jonathan Raper, Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby, David Mountain, Jo Wood that benefited me to frame of my thesis. Besides arguing on the potential of volunteer generated information (VGI), the discussion centered on the influence of the presentation of location information on the behavior of people (the difference in the communication in CatchBob! (passivity), multiplicity of the sources of information and location-information trunking for taxi drivers) and these behaviors influence the data (feedback loop in WikiCity, geotagging in Flickr). I was in fact advised to focus on how the co-evoluation between location-aware systems and their user’s practices/behaviors (data influencing the behaviors influencing the data).

Relation to my thesis: This week’s trip in the UK is about testing my ideas and approaches with a verity of experts from different fields (I got the pleasure to meet UCL’s Jon Reades to discuss urban planning and urban computing). I must admit that it is a truly rewarding experience to pick the brains of geographers, geovisualization experts and social scientists and have them criticize my work. Presenting and arguing on the current state of my research work should help me create a “meme” and that everybody starts to believe my “story”. Many people have now advised me to get back to my different experiments and (re)define what there is to study for each of them. Categories or research thems and specific question should help me focus on 1 specific aspect and help me find the gaps in “my story” (e.g. thesis).

A couple of paper that discuss the emergence of the large data generated by sensor now sharing our lives:

First, Data management in the worldwide sensor web draws the big picture in mentioning that now too much attention has been placed on the networking issues of distributed sensing and too little on tools to manage, analyze and understand the data. The authors ask the question weather we can design sensor networks with data quality in mind? They ask a very crucial question, but as often in location-aware computing, it is very unclear on who can claim what quality in location information is or in other words who can answer “how good is good enough?”. Of course it is important to manage temporal and spatial data and handle their inherent uncertainty (e.g. via probabilistic theory) or mask it (e.g. via interpolation) or play with it (seamful design). It seems clear now that my thesis is about acknowledging that situation (uncertainty in the location information, fluctuant quality in the data), but instead of aiming to produce “perfect data”, I plan to provide an understanding and solutions from a human and urban perspective. It comes, at the first place, with the observation of people experiencing location-aware systems in CatchBob!, and making use of location information, in my taxi driver (co-evolution, context and granularity). This observations help me accumulating evidences on the contextual factors influencing the granularity (≈human expectation of quality) of the location information used.
Balazinska, M., Deshpande, A., Franklin, M. J., Gibbons, P. B., Gray, J., Hansen, M., Liebhold, M., Nath, S., Szalay, A., and Tao, V. (2007). Data management in the worldwide sensor web. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6(2):30–40.

Second, Citizens as Voluntary Sensors: Spatial Data Infrastructure in the World of Web 2.0 discusses that the most powerful sensor web is made of the 6 billion humans occupying Earth’s surface. This large collection of mobile and intelligent sensors will affect the processes by which geographic information acquisition and compilation (VGI: volunteered geographic information). The data generated suffer similar issues as a top down (authoritarian, centrist paradigm) when it comes to the fluctuating quality in the data and trust. However, the notion that citizens with means of taking measurements is at the source of the solution to the problems mentioned above. The analysis of how these “citizens” handle and annotate their measurements and observations allow to further understand the influencing factors in the use of location granularity. This is why I study Flickr users in their spatial annotation practice and in their use of geographic semantics.
Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as voluntary sensors: Spatial data infrastructure in the world of web 2.0. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 2:24–32.

Third, the digital traces (shared measurements/observations) left by people in space allow to define a human description of space (e.g. citizen definition of a neighborhood). This type of sensor web data can only make sense with geovisualization, as the ones presented in Interactive Visual Exploration of a Large Spatio-temporal Dataset: Reflections on a Geovisualization Mashup. The authors explore the new opportunities for visualizing sensor web data to explain user behaviors. Tools such as Google Earth provide a quick support for visual synthesis and preliminary investigation of digital traces.
Wood, J., Dykes, J., Slingsby, A., and Clarke, K. (2007). Interactive visual exploration of a large spatio-temporal dataset: Reflections on a geovisualization mashup. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13(6):1176–1183.

Relation to my thesis: Each of these three paper give an overview of the main themes of my thesis that aims to take a human and urban perspective to define the quality of location information:
1. Issues in the quality in the location data (uncertainty).
2. New data to observe people handle/experience location granularity in order to collecting evidences.
3. New visualization to reveal how people perceive and describe the urban space

In Denis Wood’s Cartography is Dead (Thank God!)

I have no interest in belittling the positive contributions made by the generations of academic cartographers - but there’s a lot that was dead wood to begin with, and is so rotten today it’s threatening the rest of it. All the prescriptive bullshit, every map must have a legend and a scale - all that - ignored in fact on a gazillion effective, useful maps, all that has to stop. And design! Academic cartographers have never understood a thing - not a thing -about design. God knows that, as a group, the least interesting, least attractive, least significant maps have been made by university cartographers: all that design talk, from design illiterates, that’s got to stop.

Relation to my thesis: A new type of science of mapmaking (or communication through maps) will need to take into account geo-communication mechanisms (as suggested by Lars Brodersen) and an understanding of the user and its context to inform the design. It will also need to inspire and communicate with the artists, engineers, designers, urban planners, … sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists, visionary, … astronomers, “canal diggers” who inspire compelling and significant work such as Kevin Lynch’s “mental maps” of Boston or Joseph Minard’s Napolean March.

Late last year, a position paper I submitted to the Urban Mixed Reality workshop at CHI’08 was only accepted as a poster presentation. In this paper, we propose that digital footprints present an opportunity to the residents and tourists the ability to look down on the city and view the activities and their consequences. When this information is fed back to the community, it can inform the decision-making and change the behaviors through social navigation. However, the design of a social navigation service should take into consideration the lack of accuracy in space and time of digital footprints. Apparently, the unique reviewer who rejected the paper understood that we propose the use of digital footprints to support people in navigating (orientation/path/aims) in the city.

So I thought that instead of flying overseas to present a poster, it might be more relevant to leave this position paper online with its reviews, open for discussion and thoughts to the reader of this blog. Considering the encouraging comments of the second reviewer, I will most probably recycle it for future publications.

Leveraging urban digital footprints with social navigation and seamful design
Girardin, F., Nova, N., Dal Fiore, F., Ratti, C., Blat, J.

Abstract. The widespread deployment of mobile and wireless technologies increases the amount of recorded interactions between humans and the urban environment. The accumulation of these digital footprints provides new opportunities to reveal human behaviors in space. Beyond their utility to improve the quantity and quality of mobility data already available to urban planners and local authorities, this information can be returned to residents and visitors to enhance their perception of the space and inform their discussions and decision making. In this paper, we argue that digital footprints, when properly revealed, can act as social navigation cues to support the exploration of the city.

[Full paper - 104KB]

Reviewer 1 (reject):
The paper discussed ideas on how to make patterns of mobility and flow based on digital footprints available to tourists and residents. The discussion is based on two concepts – ‘social navigation’ and ‘seamful design’. I miss a reflection on previous studies on supporting people’s orientations/paths/aims when moving in a city through giving them visual information. This is a quite complex endeavor and it is not sufficient to provide a ‘vision’ without thorough grounding. For example, I don’t underdstand the usefulness of ‘seams’ (uncertainty of data, lack of timeliness, etc.) for people. You may want to read Bill Gaver’s paper on ‘Ambiguity as a resource for design’.

Reviewer 2 (accept):
The paper argues for the use of digital footprints as social navigation cues for the exploration of the city. Digital footprints are space and time referenced data that are produced by the increased amount of recorded interactions between humans and the urban environment. The paper presents an approach meant to leverage this kind of mobility data to support awareness of the overall dynamics of an urban space and affect the discussion and decision-making of residents and visitors in that space. Challenges inherent to the rendering of spatio-temporal data in mobile and urban environments are addressed by adopting a “seamful design” approach revealing the imperfection of the sensed data.

The contribution of the paper to an overall framework for the social use of mobility data is timely and likely to raise discussion. Suggestions for improvement: the authors may want to better explain the idea of “cultural views of mobility” and provide more examples on the kind of data that could be used and how their visualization would inform people’s behaviour in the urban space.