A global citizen is not the one that travels the globe rushing from one destination to the next at the furious pace its business demand, but the one that roams the roads of a city or the world open to the opportunities that serendipity will bring, architecting with each moment a fulfilling life devoted to creating value for the communities he touches, combining his skills with the resources available. Such a nice maxim for any traveller, you must be thinking.

But as much as we fantasize about travelling the world and becoming that global explorer, we are mostly driven by rituals. We go to school or work following the same route every day, we meet with more or less the same people and exchange in average the same rehearsed words. We like the little thrills that the modern hyper-connected world gives us, but we end up “friending” all the same 150 people we’ve known our entire lives. We like the detachment of “following” a few intellectuals or celebrities as there is no effort on our end but panic if a random stranger talk to us on the street. In the long run, we find ourselves surrounded by too many comfortable mellow relationships that are too kind to shake us a little bit and push us higher.

As isolated as may feel in a world of 7 billion people, there is one hero that is surging ahead, thriving on openness and mastering all the skills learned through three or four generations of social networks: our avatar. That smiling, fearless, handsome self-portrait not afraid of making up a few stories to find a place in the collective streams of strangers (the more the better), using the 8-bit equivalent of a grave-voice to teach everyone else life-lessons and revealing beauty in the mundane (yes, that same scene we saw at every commute for years). This alter-ego has found its place in our real-world, projecting our deepest and most sacred thoughts onto a canvas that looks more like a matrix-esque thumbnail composition that exudes personality. Our personality.

And now that our digital avatars feel at easy out there, broadcasting 24/7 on our behalf, are all of sudden running into each other without the caution characteristic of their masters. We call it serendipity in our world, to them it may be algorithmic association or visual coherence, but whatever their secret, it is working. They are now assembled in entire genres and sub-cultures that we barely knew existed, not unlike artisans of a forgotten medieval craft.

And now, for their final movement, they are about to teach us a lesson: how to go back to our tribal ways, connecting with those whose avatars have brought down the walls of anonymity in the name of creating meaningful connections that will rescue our communities from the apathy of routine.

Leave a Comment

X-Summit conference, October 2011

Just to make sure every attendee would drop their assumptions at the door and would engage in defining the future of interactive media, the opening keynote was by Scott Snibble, who is responsible for the recently launched interactive music iOS app Biophilia. Some say is the first interactive album and the beginning of a new distribution model for the music business. I was simply blown-away by the fact that such an adventurous project had found its way into a mainstream audience and had done so while creating amazingly sophisticated interactive experiences. Clearly the audience is ready to evolve and participate in much more rich ways.

Soon I realized that I was probably the only technologist in a conference full of creatives and producers. Ironic, as most of these people are trying to master the foundation that is required to make their productions more interactive and social to safeguard their future in the entertainment industry. To the many people I had the opportunity to meet, my pitch was a variation of the this:

Imagine a media show that is produced in such a way that multiple threads of narrative exist and a well-planned production makes it possible for all those stories to fork and converge at the will of every single viewer. Viewing the show on an evolved video platform would allow the audience to influence the outcome and experience specific bits chosen based on a wide range of parameters such as location, demographics, past interaction and personal preferences such as parental control. Now, know that such a video platform already exists: it is called the web and it already has everything that you need to make this a reality.

The excitement was palpable and I look forward to being part of architecting such a future. If some of the elements in this pitch sound familiar it is because I’ve been advocating such a future for the last 5 years (read lonelytv)

In fact, some of the projects we’re working on right now are already taking advantage of modern web standards to accomplish seamless video manipulation responding to user interaction.

One key take away from the conference is that 2011 has been a year of great experimentation by big studios growing confident in their understanding of how to deliver interactive projects that cross platforms. Some of them are doing so by creating entirely new genres of entertainment like Machinima. 2012 is only going to see this space grow bolder in its attempt to redefine entertainment.

Leave a Comment

Tribal Mix is creating a tool that will allow newsrooms around the world to keep up with the growing volume of video content and find those worth integrating into news stories.

In order to keep up with the endless stream of video content (35 hrs of video uploaded every minute!) we need a tool that will mimic the ways in which users consume video today: multiple sources and channels, endless streams of content, collaborative viewing, short snippets.

The Use Case: imagine you’re running the Al Jazeera news desk responsible for reporting Egypt’s revolution. You have a couple of crews on the ground placed at strategic locations such as Tahir Square, but in reality nobody really knows what is about to happen or how long it will take. Spontaneously, civilians on the ground start to take little video vignettes with their mobile cameras and upload. Back at the news desk, you launch the Tribal Mix dashboard, configure a collection of tags that seem to be popular in the context of this story and let it run. The dashboard becomes available as part of your main web story about the event as a “latest videos” link. When users everywhere launch the dashboard, they automatically participate in the curation process by scanning the feed, clicking on those videos that appear more interesting. In fact, only a couple of hours into this process, a thumbnail that contains a sequence with a burning car starts to “grow”, as a result of its visual impact. Now you have a story to report… with video.

Breaking news today requires monitoring an overwhelming number of “social media” channels, yet journalists can’t afford to spend their time doing so. Traditional tools such as Google and other custom search engines have the disadvantage that you will only uncover good content once it has become really popular, which means that someone else already ran the snippet.

On the other hand, the public has demonstrated to be very effective in spotting good content amid an ocean of submissions. The crowd sourced approach makes sense very early in the media gathering and filtering process as an initial step to dramatically reduce the volume of content that professional news people have to interact with. Let the audience be your collaborator.

Some professional video tools are available at enterprise prices, but they are limited in that they can only be used by paid user seats. By combining a set of existing open technologies and frameworks, not only I can deliver the solution presented, but can do so in a way that the resulting software product has little development cost and very low operational costs, usually scaling whenever there is intense use of the infrastructure.

TECHNICAL DESIGN

Earlier in the process I had provided a quick snapshot of what the tool could look like and even provided a concise set of design directives that would make sure the tool remains true to the idea of openness and transparency and is built on the fundamental premise that the audience is integrated into the news gathering process. But to implement this project a lot more is needed:

Click to see the diagram

The Stream: videos exist everywhere and the ability to use videos where they are is important to consolidate sources (YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter) into a single stream of all possible candidates.

The Engine: using a series of video techniques such as time-lapsing, a series of vignettes would be rendered for each video submitted. This is a CPU intensive task that can scale very nicely using a cluster of servers (Amazon EC2 for example). On the other hand, many of the tools to accomplish this technically already exists and have very open software licenses such as FFMPEG. At this point, I’m assuming that all videos will be pre-processed and the version used in the Dashboard is an animation rendered by the browser.

The Dashboard: is the main user interface that allows a viewer to inspect all the pre-processed snippets and implicitly mark those that seem to have better content quality. It is meant to be used by a large number of viewers and for that group to influence each other’s viewing targets by visually giving higher priority to those snippets that get more “air time” from the audience. The only currency that viewers can use to favour specific content is their own viewing time, so the system is hard to game. Built on HTML5 + CSS3 + JQuery (compatibility) + Masonry (layout) + Popcorn (video integration and measurement), this solution is at the forefront of web standards and should work beautifully across all modern browsers.

Play with the prototype yourself: notice how video boxes “grow” as you let the videos run longer. Imagine that effect multiplied by a group of hundreds of viewers using the tool simultaneously.

Technical Challenges: during the prototype development I was able to identify the following technical issues that will need special attention to create a mature tool:

• Video content found on the web is not necessarily tagged properly to reflect proper licensing. The engine will without question render a “modified” version of the original content so a proper copy-left license is required. Finding the right approach to integrate this information into the stream will likely require further thinking. I’m particularly interested in Creative Commons machine-readable licenses as a possible solution, but this may limit the amount of content available to the stream in the first place.
• Vignettes rendered are currently built as Animated GIFs. This format, though, has several technical limitation such as a colour palette restricted to 256 colours and the fact that there is absolutely no compression on the final animation, creating a very large file to be downloaded by the browser. Further to that, rendering these requires a fairly good CPU which disqualifies mobile browsers. I believe technology on video is evolving fast enough that using an actual video codec would be possible.

Acknowledgements:
- To Phillip, Pippin, Alex and the rest of the #MozNewsLab crew for organizing an incredible lab.
- To Amy, James, Raynor, Saleem and a great group of peers for the help and stimulating feedback.

Leave a Comment

Thanks Alain Bachellier @ Flickr

In his “the people formerly known as the audience“, Jay Rosen pursues the idea of how modern technologies have shifted the balance between audience and the traditional producers of news. A modern newsroom has to be built around the notion that the public WILL get involved in the process of gathering the news. Such was the insight offered by Mohamed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera when talking about their most popular stories. So, the most important collaborator in a newsroom today is THE AUDIENCE.

So, to build around the audience as an active participant, I’ve put together a few design directives for my video dashboard project, using the advice from Oliver himself (“The user interface doesn’t connect eye with screen, it links head and hand”):

• The video dashboard should be able to process videos elsewhere, simply by subscribing to a RSS feed. Ideally the feeds will be machine-tagged so intellectual property rights are obeyed when finding the videos. After all, the videos will be subject to a massive transformation in order to be usable within the dashboard.
• The curation process should be with the audience. Open access to the contents of a given stream would allow those interested in specific topics to get raw access to the library and influence which videos get more attention throughout the process.
• To police content, we need a community-driven approach, one that requires little effort for the community to enforce and requires a lot of energy for trolls to game. Every user gets to flag inappropriate content with a single action, but only the community as a group gets to push content up in relevance, by actually watching the content.
• We need to provide clear indication of which content is fresher within the stream, as it is more likely to be important. This aligns with the “breaking news” culture in newsrooms everywhere.
• The feedback method for the audience to participate in the curation of content should be trivial, can be followed by anyone with access to the stream and has an immediate impact on what others will see afterwards. Implicit feedback in the form of javascript events resulting from certain actions from users will be captured and used to render the dashboard for future users.
• To keep the interface simple, only basic gestures will be used: swipe to move around the dashboard, single click/tap to watch content.

Release a dashboard to the audience and see it transform under their control, revealing the snippets of content that will shape the next story.

Leave a Comment

A very insightful creative mind once said that people don’t remember much about your site’s design. Fonts, colours, layout are all very important, yes, but the one things people don’t forget is their first emotional reaction. That’s all you have to design for. That first glimpse that without any objectivity defines the entire future of your relationship. Along the same lines Clotaire Rapaille (The Culture Code book) preaches the science of creating very deep connections between products and consumers, sometimes inquiring into our collective childhood to unlock cultural elements that have defined the behavior for an entire generation.

Fast forward to the age of interactive sites and you’ll have @jjg, the very own “father of AJAX” and author of “The Elements of User Experience” explaining how all you can control is the emotion. Most people are already wired to react to certain codes (cultural codes, that is). So, when building a new tool or application, it makes sense to build a foundation that is deeply engrained into our collective story.

How? From strategy to visual design any good product needs to be evaluated from two perspectives: what do users need and what does the product is trying to accomplish? In the following video I explain the first:

Provide a new medium, fluid and boundless, that allows the hive mind to quickly scan through a vast library of digital videos to uncover the most important snippets in order to keep up with the growing volume of video content.

None of us is young enough to have grown up surrounded by media. And so we look for artificial organization schemes to serialize our consumption. They are called TV “series” for a reason. But observation of how younger generations consume media has led me to believe that a new medium where multiple storylines are being played out simultaneously is not only possible but it will eventually improve our ability to digest through the increasing volume of information using patterns of consumption that we haven’t even discovered.

Of course, creating such a medium to interact with video seems like an impossible task today. But with a little help from standards, open source projects and the power of a very energetic Mozilla community I’m convinced we have all the elements to make it happen:
HTML5 with its capabilities to display video directly provides the perfect lightweight canvas for this project.

CSS3 can provide all the fluid layout without sacrificing performance.

JQuery and other javascript libraries like Modernizr will enable this dashboard to run across a variety of platforms without having to worry about all the different implementation details.

Because the challenge is to unlock video we’ll have to leverage libraries like popcorn.js to make sure the video content is actionable and the dashboard truly serves as a discovery tool.

Finally AJAX will enable realtime measurement of any action on the dashboard in such a way that the actions of users will influence how videos are presented to subsequent visitors.

Try the live demo.

Leave a Comment

Source: Jamie Beck @ From Me To You (tumblr)

The image above is known as a cinemagraph. I like the idea of time freezing so we can keep up with the influx of news. Even better if the little time we had available could be focused on a digest, the modern equivalent to the photocopy art that Mark Surman refers to when explaining Hackasaurus, a new Mozilla project to remix the web. So simple that even kids can do it.

Do you know how kids remix content today? Tumblr. The moodboard of a generation. I believe that the “News as a mall” analogy is very fitting to how people scan Tumblr. After all, each snippet carries its own baggage of context and could very well represent a whole story. We just don’t have the time to dive into each story anymore.

This is one of the fundamental challenges of modern journalism organizations: how to present what is important to readers within the limited attention span we, the audience, grant them. This is too the reason I’m thrilled to be part of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, collaborating with a small but talented group of Hacks and Hackers to invent the future of news.

Burt Herman from Hacks & Hackers summarized his experience building Storify as “just build it“. A school of startup thinking that is very prevalent today. But it was Aza Raskin who took that premise to the extreme with his “How to Prototype and Influence People“, a session full of great one-liners. How rapid? You should plan your first one to be done in one day!

TinyWrld, my little tumblr devoted to city videos was launched in one day. Today, more than 4,000 followers later, I know I have something valuable. Its community has allowed me to learn fast on everything from video codecs, players, compatibility across platforms to the qualities that make a video stand-out. Take a quick look at the TinyWrld archive and take a guess as to which posts are the most popular…

If your eyes were drawn to the animated gifs, you’re not alone. Those posts got thousands of mentions, indicating it was critical to use moving vignettes to showcase video content. And with this realization we come full circle back to cinemagraphs. The notorious blogger Anil Dash has claimed the come back of Animated GIFs. But not just any animated GIF. There is a growing group of artists producing sophisticated silent movies of just a few seconds.

In an era of information overload, it is refreshing to watch a movie in just 5 seconds and move on. Well, that is the premise of my project for the Learning Lab: using a combination of video techniques to distill hours and hours of footage into a dashboard (yes, I was inspired by Amanda Cox visualizations) that resembles my TinyWrld archive, full of little vignettes that allow the user to decide when to dig deeper into a story and when to move on. It’s like a Twitter for video.

Leave a Comment

A few months ago I started a little Tumblr called TinyWrld, which was nothing but an interesting collection of tilt-shifts from around the world, depicting mostly urban scenes in the unequivocal visual style of “miniatures”. The visual coherence among the videos made me assume that there was a given formula for producing these videos, and my journey through understanding the technique started.

For that project to be considered a success, I wanted to have videos from as many cities as possible. This meant that a lot of people would have to eventually contribute their own. It would have to be dead easy for many people to succeed in creating something as interesting as those videos I was collecting. As much as I tried to find the right tools to produce these videos in the simplest possible way, most paths required some sort of semi-pro editing tool and many hours of production. Clearly that was not the right way.

To the professional photographer, tilt-shift implies advanced knowledge of optics and some fairly sophisticated lenses. But to people without such training, videos are simply accelerated and blurred on the edges. It just happens that those two transformations are quite simple to script and I figured that the only tool that a contributor should need were a browser to upload the “raw” video. The rest of the process could probably be executed automatically without any human intervention. As silly as that sounds, the fact is that it only took a few experiments to accomplish exactly that. It couldn’t get any more simpler than that… for the user.

What I realized at that point is that the framework that I was building to automate certain video transformations was useful for a lot more than just tilt-shifts. In fact, the more I kept talking to people about it, the more scenarios we came up with that would benefit from such a tool. To our dismay, there weren’t many tools out there and most of them required a fair amount of technical knowledge.

Video is pervasive across the web. Everyone has their favorite video website and I think it is safe to say that most people are able to shoot video one way or another and get it to the web. But every single movie that goes up, stays up as an untouchable unit. Videos are rarely though of as data structures that can be manipulated to achieve new objectives, yet that very possibility will push us to a new model for production of media where snippets of action, very short, and easily interchangeable provide the framework for creating many different stories that may appeal to different media consumers which participate by providing comments or producing additional snippets of content and endless hooks to plug-in their own ideas into the story. In this new medium there are no rules on how to consume the message, which distorts the message itself and provides creative license to the audience.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Our first objective is to launch a very simple API that will enable creative video manipulation without having to spend hours in front of an editing tool. Want to try it out or suggest ideas? Please drop us a line.

Leave a Comment

We live in a very tiny world. Fortunate the global citizen that can claim to have seen enough of it to make this affirmation and lucky the city that can keep him engaged enough for his ideas to shape the society of tomorrow.

This sums up my hopes around travel, entrepreneurship, a better world and yes, a little new project of mine that I will uncover today. It is, at the same time, a poetic farewell to 2010 and a geeky welcome to 2011.

I should start by making an obvious statement: I love everything about cities. A quick look at my archives reveals over 50 posts devoted to everything from meaningless statistics about which cities are the most livable to ahead-of-their-time academic papers uncovering their implicit organic rhythms. My firm conviction that the city will acquire a more relevant role in our future society as the country struggles to survive may be unsettling but undeniable and well supported by thinkers like Parag Khanna.

Yet, we go about our lives without marveling at the processes that make our cities work.

Over the last few years, the amazing evolution of digital maps as pervasive canvas for statistics, galleries of avatars and location tools has given us a new perspective on cities that is fueling a great generation of tools that is helping us as individuals make better use of our cities. From traditional road assistance and full featured maps, to social games and applications that change our social behaviour or the way we leverage the resources of a city.

If you have iTunes, take a quick look and the number of applications related to maps, for example.

Yet, in doing so, these maps have abstracted the beauty of our cities into polygons, dots and labels. In the best case scenario they have used an outdated satellite image or a few 360 panoramas taken a few months ago. In the worst case scenario we could completely misunderstand what a place is all about. Just look at the following two visual representations of Mecca, the first a standard satellite image as rendered by Google, from which you can browse and navigate a serious of photos taken in the area.

The alternate version a time-lapse video that will reveal far more about this holy place than any photograph or satellite imagery can tell:

For the last month, I’ve been scouting the web looking for evidence that we’re ready to start capturing our world the way we see it and experience it. The result so far is a collection of over 50 videos that will unambiguously represent a place like no map could do it: Toronto, the Gold Coast in Australia, Chemnitz, Morroco, San Diego, Oslo, Granada, New York, Krakow, Athens, Paris, Mexico City, London, Shanghai, Torino, Tokyo.

This collection and some ideas that will grow from it are

TinyWrld.com

(Take a quick look and come back to read the rest).

Now imagine if these videos could be browsed the way we use maps today.

Why Tilt-Shift / Time-Lapse?

• the format is easy to obtain with cheap cameras, just like the one in your smartphone. In most cases, these videos are created as a series of photographs taken a few seconds apart, and then assembled into a video.
• the “little people” effect is quite convenient when shooting strangers as they all become unrecognizable. For those of you familiar with “model releases”, you’ll understand how much time can be saved. In particular I like the fact that the viewer can be oblivious to race or gender of people in the video.
• fixed on a given location allows us to use them as a reference, just like we would a map. This meta-data could be essential to create a large canvas made out of videos like these ones.
• time lapse technique makes it possible to capture long periods of time and compress them into a few seconds or minutes. Often times, you need more than just one frame from a given place to really get the “essence” of the place, right?
• there is something about the “bird’s eye view” that creates a model of reality that is easier to relate to. Yes, most people can read maps, but haven’t you found yourself staring at the facades of buildings trying to figure out which way to go after finding the place on a map? It just happens that tilt-shifts are usually shot from high places providing this perspective.

Cool? I would love to hear your comments. Or perhaps now you’re intrigued enough to follow TinyWrld.

Leave a Comment

In the northern hemisphere winter becomes a faded memory as the days get longer and we rediscover the rituals of daylight-saving season. One of these is clearly the ritual of planning what we’ll watch during the summer as our favourite shows go dormant.

In the end of television I had ventured into a world where we were no longer forced to sit in front of the television set at a specific time to join the collective trance that was prime time TV. While it was written almost three years ago, it reads as a note from the recent news:

If TV has been so engrained in our culture, what does the BitTorrent revolution means? What can we infer when corporations decide to take action by targeting TV Download Sites [Pirate Bay]? They were obviously nervous about how much attention was being taken from them. It took a gutsy move by Apple [and YouTube, Hulu, Boxee et al] to admit that there was no going back to the television set and that content producers had to find ways of leveraging the Internet as the new distribution channel. While we can debate that downloading shows to a computer is pretty much the same as watching them on television, I believe these are the early attempts by some enterpreneurs to end the addiction to TV. We should only expect this trend to grow as a new aspect of our global culture as the alternatives and mechanisms become available across all layers of society.

After three years of unplugging the cable, I’m still plugged into the collective culture by virtue of a number of venues that provide ongoing access to the most relevant items of the daily digest: a larger number of sites have made some of their content available in streams, a larger variety of appliances are able to connect to the web to offer alternative content, torrents are available for a very large number of prime time shows, some networks have signed exclusive distribution deals to make their content available through specific channels. In short, there is a lot of content out there.

In fact, I’ve noticed I don’t download much music anymore. Not because I’m getting it for free at some underground website run by pirates, but because the amount of media available continues to grow at such an overwhelming pace that there is no space for one more download. I realize I’m nothing but one particular case, but so I was when decided to unplug the cable.

Television has been a powerful factor in shaping our behavior as a society over the last few decades. Marshall McLuhan pointed out well ahead of most that while the print had forced people into the abstract world of letters and words, accelerating the diffusion of ideas, television was going to reverse the process by leveling access to culture by means of simple images, creating along the way a univeral language of very concrete symbols, enabling what he called the “Global Village”.

And while television played its levelling role quite well, we now find ourselves at a point where the amount of content greatly exceeds the capacity of humans to consume it and so we must be selective in our watching. This means that while all those simple images could be available to everyone, the fact is that only a small percentage of them will be.

Or put in other words: what good is to have access to so much content if you can’t decide what to watch? There is a famous snippet of TV history from the show Max Headroom where a broadcaster had figured out ways to compress lengthy content into just a few seconds of watching. I don’t believe such technology has been invented just yet (maybe it will be 20 minutes in the future), but in the meantime we’ll have to figure out how to get better at selecting the content we watch. The curation processes that we put in place next will be critical to the shaping of our culture. The immediate collective consensus that was brought up by television will now be diluted by the multitude of possibilities, redefining the concept of multiculturalism. Nothing wrong with that.

Leave your fears of running out of shows to watch this next summer. Chances are that there will be plenty that you haven’t discovered and they will all be available upon request.

Leave a Comment

Almost four years ago I wrote a small article entitled the “Birth of Cool” that was intended to speculate on possible uses for the then largely unsophisticated mobile space.

Every day you cross paths with hundreds of people as you go to work, run your errands, find entertainment and go about your life. Without noticing, all your electronic devices are listening for any cue on their digital surroundings. Armed with low-intensity transmission protocols they are capable of establishing instant communication with those in close proximity. Spread across the city, a vast array of hidden transmitters are continuously feeding the information-hungry mobile community. As you visit a gallery and admire a piece of art, a simple click will record your opinion about the moment.

Throughout the city you’ll exchange your opinion about all those places you’ve been to and things you’ve seen with every stranger that happens to be “listening”. At the same time you will have received a few dozen tokens representing what the invisible crowd you never met thought was their coolest experience.

At the time I was particularly interested in the massive adoption of mobile devices that had the capability of broadcasting location information, and while GPS were far from mainstream, there were other ways to convey location information. In an alternate present important locations around a city would be broadcasting low-intensity messages (bluetooth?) that would only be picked up by people in the proximity. Today there are many ways in which this vision has been realized: standard smart-phones are equipped either with GPS or the means to triangulate position based on radio or cell tower signals. The map interface is now a must on many mobile applications.

All technology aside the most interesting aspect about this milestone is that as a collective, we humans are leaving a digital breadcrumb that describes many aspects of our lives. Maps are no longer updated every few years, but in some cases a few times per month, revealing the incredibly sophisticated processes at play in the growth of a city. The same goes for an always increasing scope of human activity. Our culture is revealing itself onto the scars that we leave on the face of our planet, the virtual paths that we traverse while exploring the real world, the info-maps that layer useful statistics, the highly evolved versions of journals that nowadays include geocoded photographs, maps, and many other artifacts. Our culture is streaming itself in high definition and nobody is watching.

While culture is vast and any exercise to try to map it would be in vain, I hope that the methodic exploration of individual snippets of data that reveal single aspects of our culture will become a common task that won’t require a degree in Cultural Anthropology. Discovering patterns of culture that would otherwise be ignored may lead to further understanding of the people around us.

It’s hard to say where this journey will take me, but I have a few ideas on where to start. From some very basic interpretations of geodata that may be useful to global citizens and travellers to an attempt to map the culture of a micro-region to bring it to pair with other areas of the world that are over-represented. From understanding the cultural aspects that thrive in urban centres to identifying unique traditions that are mutually exclusive with large cities. These are all aspects of the same endeavour: using the digital breadcrumb to understand our global culture.

Leave a Comment