On May 27th 2015, Cathal Gurrin and Rami Albatal visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on lifelogging, covering the history of creating lifelogs, technological developments in the field, the current state of the practice and future possibilities for comprehensive personal data.
The talk was extremely well received, and this video of the event should be of interest to anone interested in lifelogging, the quantified self, personal or wearable technologies or the emergence and possibilities of personal data.
The event will bring technologists, legal practitioners, technology companies and academics together in order to address the common issues faced by the different parties. The goal is to facilitate the communication of differing perspectives in an effort to formulate a unified approach to developing privacy issues.
Confirmed speakers for the event are:
Keynotes Dara Murphy, TD – Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection. Helen Dixon – Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland.
Confirmed speakers for the first session of the event, “Privacy in a digital world: notions and understandings of privacy in a digital infrastructure”, are:
Leighton Evans‘ first book – Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age – has just been published by Palgrave. A great achievement and a very useful addition to the literature, combining theoretical rigour with rich empirical material. The back cover blurb runs thus:
Locative Social Media offers a critical analysis of the effect of using locative social media on the perceptions and phenomenal experience of lived in spaces and places. It includes a comprehensive overview of the historical development of traditional mapping and global positioning technology to smartphone-based application services that incorporate social networking features as a series of modes of understanding place. Drawing on users accounts of the location-based social network Foursquare, a digital post-phenomenology of place is developed to explain how place is mediated in the digital age. This draws upon both the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and post-phenomenology to encompass the materiality and computationality of the smartphone. The functioning and surfacing of place by the device and application, along with the orientation of the user, allows for a particular experiencing of place when using locative social media termed attunement, in contrast to an instrumentalist conception of place.
Copies can be ordered from Palgrave, Amazon and all other book retailers.
Many congrats, Leighton. Hopefully the first of many books. Details on book launch to follow.
A new working paper by Rob Kitchin, Sophia Maalsen and Gavin McArdle – The Praxis and Politics of Building Urban Dashboards – has been published on SSRN as Programmable City Working Paper 11. The abstract runs thus:
This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard — a website that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information — from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence, to unpack the building of the Dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.
Through the development and adoption of technical solutions to address city issues the smart city seeks to create effortless and friction-free environments and systems. Yet, the design and implementation of such technical solutions are friction-rich endeavours which produce unanticipated consequences and generate turbulence that foreclose the creation of friction-free city solutions. In this paper we argue that a focus on frictions is important for understanding civic hacking and the role of social smart citizens, providing an account of frictions in the development of a smart city app. The empirical study adopted an ethnographically informed mobile methods approach to follow how frictions emerge and linger in the design and production of a queuing app developed through civic hacking. In so doing, the paper charts how solutions have to be worked up and strategies re-negotiated when a shared motivation meets differing skills, perspectives, codes or designs; how solutions are contingently stabilised in technological, motivational, spatiotemporal and organisational specificities rather than unfolding in a smooth, linear, progressive trajectory.
On Thursday two members of the ProgCity team – Rob Kitchin and Tracey Lauriault – presented at the Open Data Summit organized by Dublinked. Rob presented a paper entitled ‘Open data: An open and shut case’ (see below for slides) and Tracey presented a paper entitled ‘The open data landscape in Ireland.’ It was an excellent event and hopefully the slides of the other talks will be put online as there was a lot of useful insight shared during the presentations and discussion.
