Hackathons are rapid design and development events at which volunteer participants come together to conceptualize, prototype, and make (mostly digital) products and services.
Coupling with the rapid pace of conceptualising a product or service, prototyping and making do with limited time and resources during the event, is the competition with other teams for the prizes, ranging from cash rewards to a spot in an incubator programme that could potentially transform the initial idea at a hackathon into a startup success.
We often see coverage of the winning teams, their ideas and sometimes their presentations before the judging panel. However, we do not necessarily know how participants reflect upon their own experiences, problems they encounter along the way and adjustments to their goals and strategies under time pressure.
In this blogpost, we try to give a glimpse of these aspects by asking participants how and what they did in the Global Data Fest/Smart City Hackathon which took place in Dublin between 6 – 8 March, 2015. The videos were taken before the teams presented their ideas to the judges, which means they did not know who were going to win and thus the conversation was not about their ‘winning experiences’. Instead, the videos are about how they took into account of all sorts of challenges and the advice they received from the mentors to finish their project. In doing so, we also wish to create cultural memory for the participants and for one the various pursuits of transforming Dublin into a smart city.
Short description
The track explores the digital, data-driven and networked making of urban environment. We welcome contributions in various formats: presentations, audio, video and photographic accounts, as well as performances and live demonstrations of public interfaces and software tools for urban analysis.
Abstract
How do software and space work in urban everyday life and urban management? How do data and policies actually shape each other? What forms of delegation, enrollment and appropriation take place?
Contemporary urban environments are characterised by dense arrangements of data, algorithms, mobile device, networked infrastructures. Multiple technologies (such as smart metering, sensing networks, GPS, CCTV, induction loops, mobile apps) are connected with multiple processes (such as institutional data management, data brokering, crowdsourcing, workflow management), aiming to provide sustainable, efficient, integrated city governance and services.
Within this context, vested interests interact in a multi-billion global market where corporations, companies and start-ups propose data-driven urban solutions, while public administrations increasingly delegate control over citizens’ data. Also, public institutions and private companies leverage the efforts of open data movements, engaged civic communities and citizen-minded initiatives to find new ways to create public and economic value from urban data.
However, the making of digital and data-driven urbanism is uncertain, fragile, contested, conflicting. The track intends to stimulate the debate on: the different forms of performing and making sense of the urban environment through data and algorithms; the different ways to approach the relationship between data, software and cities.
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions critically addressing the following (non-exhaustive-list-of) topics:
– urban big data, dashboards, data analytics and brokering;
– IoT based urban services and governance;
– civic hacking, open data movements;
– privacy, security and surveillance in data-driven cities;
– crowd, mobility and traffic management;
– sensors, monitoring, mapping and modelling for urban facilities;
– digitization of built environment.
Paper proposals should include: a paper title (no more than 10 words); author/co-authors; a short abstract (maximum 300 characters including spaces) and a long one (up to 250 words). The long abstract will be shown on the web and the short one is what will be displayed in the conference programme.
Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote big data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another, and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.
Keywords: Data analytics, computing experiments, locative media, location-based social network (LBSN), staging, urban future, critical data studies
Session 5 is our last session of the Code and the City workshop. Video of the previous sessions are here: Session 1, Session 2, Session 3 and Session 4.
Session 5: Cities, code and governance
Coding alternative modes of governance: ‘Smart cities’ to ‘data cities’ Alison Powell, Media & Communications, LSE
Abstract
Within the last twenty years the concept of the “smart city” has emerged and re-emerged, focusing on various ways that technology layers new capacities over existing urban infrastructures. These “smart cities” are changing. The “smart city” of the early 2000s was a communicative city, while the smart city of the 2010s is a data city. The dynamics of these are different: a communicative city promises representation through voice – the ability to speak and listen – while a data city promises representation through information – information collected about individuals is fed back to civic decision makers who enact decisions based upon it. Data is thus a product flowing from citizen to government. In data cities governance is also different: both communicative and data cities could be the result of top-down governance decisions or subject to bottom-up reconfigurations, the ways that those decisions are enacted are quite different. A communicative city promises a democratic value to citizens of greater access to information, while a data city promises a value to governments of greater access to data about citizens. This structural inequity is particularly evident when we consider what must happen to data in a data city – it must be calculated.
Within a macro-political perspective, centralized calculation of data gathered from citizens is essential for developing visions of responsive, data-rich, centrally controlled smart cities. This seems to close off the potential for an alternative mode of governance for the contemporary data city. However, the expansion of participatory culture has created efforts to democratize collection of data about cities, through citizen science projects including air quality and noise mapping. In these projects, the legitimacy of the hierarchical city is challenged by the oppositional data collected by citizens, taken as evidence of an opposition between the “constituted knowledge” of institutions like city governance and the “adaptive knowledge” of loosely organized communities of practice (see Mansell, 2013). This contest of knowledge contrasts the two modes of combining citizenship, technology and space, the ‘hierarchical city’ and the ‘peer to peer’ city. Participatory data collection does seem to enact an alternative to centralized authority, but it is not clear whether data – without calculation – is really shifting governance.
Building upon the central contrast between hierarchical and peer to peer cities, this paper considers how the “micro politics” of cities are altered as calculation is integrated into civic participation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of peer to peer cities including community networks, citizen science, it argues that peer to peer calculation is the most significant yet most difficult activation of alternative governance of urban space.
Big data and stratification urban futures Agnieszka Leszczynski, Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
Abstract
Code has been recognized as intimately implicated in the socio-spatial stratification of cities. Big data in particular are underwriting a sweeping intensification of practices of socio-spatial sorting, which refers to the organization of city spaces into social and economic categories so as to categorize and effectively manage the individuals who inhabit them. These practices directly shape and reinforce material urban geographies of social disparity. One of the primary areas where we find evidence of this is in the increasing leveraging of big data towards the prefiguring of urban spatial pre-futures of deviance. Big data and attendant analytics are reproducing and reifying disenfranchisement alog axes of race, class, socioeconomic status, and geography at scales from the city as a whole to individual neighbourhoods so as to create material spaces for specific kinds of vertical surveillance interventions (e.g., increased police presence), and to justify the targeting of particular neighborhoods and neighbourhood populations for these practices (e.g., by prefiguring them as criminalized a priori). The ways in which this is enacted in practice is
discussed with reference to, amongst others, the EMOTIVE Twitter analytics software program designed as a riot prevention system in the UK, and the Chicago Police Department’s turn to big data analytics as a predictive policing measure.
The cryptographic city David M. Berry, Media & Communication, University of Sussex
Abstract
Questions about opacity and transparency have been turned upside down in the post-Snowden era. With the certainty of tracking technologies, surveillance and monitoring, a new turn towards anonymity, opaque presence and crypto-identity has emerged in digital networks. This paper looks to examine questions of cryptography and encryption in relation to the city, particularly in relation to the increasing mediation of life through algorithms, software and code. Key questions are the relationship between opacity and opaque presence and notions of publicness and city space, but also the way in which the city as a programmable city will increasingly rely upon the cryptographic layers. Through an engagement with the notion of ‘capture’ the paper seeks to think through the limits of what we might call plaintext code/space and reflect on the crypto code/spaces and their materialities.
Additional Videos from previous sessions
Session 4 – Cultural curation and urban Interfaces: Locative media as experimental platforms for cultural data Nanna Verhoeff, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Abstract
My contribution is concerned with the way in which urban interfaces are used for access to cultural collections – whether institutionally embedded, or bottom-up, participatory collections. Designed in code and exploring affordances of new location-based and/or mobile technologies for urban space-making, these interfaces are thought to be powerful tools for ideals of participatory urban culture. I propose to approach these “projects” as curatorial machines, as urban experimental laboratories for cultural data. This entails a threefold perspective, on curation, on code, and on principles of creative (sometimes artistic or playful) experimentation.
For this, we may remind ourselves of the curatorial project of museal and archival institutions, of preserving, and “caring” for the object, as well as creating new contexts for the object and providing access for an urban public – a field which is very much in transition as a result of current ambitions for new public engagement and ideals of participation, pervasive in all socio-economic and political regions of contemporary culture. Simultaneously we witness the current interest in the principles of data curation as the care for, interaction with, interpretation and visualisation of digital data, as the datafication and codification of culture invades all corners of urban life. Design of interfaces is central in how we can access, work with, and make meaning with digital culture. Departing from the concept of dispositif in the analysis of interfaces, I propose to bring together the fact that the interfaces are coded and designed, to (playfully) experiment with their affordances.
In my approach to this intersection of datafication of, and the proliferation of interfaces for “culture”, I aim to develop heuristic tools for critical evaluation of this phenomenon, broadly bracketed as [urban interfaces] as interfaces of cultural curation.
If you missed any of the videos from the first three sessions, they are here: Session 1, Session 2 and Session 3.
Session 4: Cities, knowledge classification and ontology
Cities and context: The codification of small areas through geodemographic classification Alex Singleton, Geography, University of Liverpool
Abstract
Geodemographic classifications group small area geography into categories based on shared population and built environment characteristics. This process of “codification” aims to create a common language for the description of salient internal structure of places, and by extension, enable their comparison across geographic contexts. The typological study of areas is not a new phenomenon, and contemporary geodemographics emerged from research conducted in the 1970s that aimed at providing a new method of targeting deprivation relief funding within the city of Liverpool. This city level model was later extended for the national context, and became the antecedent of contemporary geodemographic classification. This paper explores the origins of geodemographics, to first illustrate that the coding of areas is not just a contemporary practice; and then extends this discussion to consider how methodological choices influence classification structure. Being open with such methods is argued as being essential for classifications to engender greater social responsibility.
The city and the Feudal Internet: Examining institutional materialities Paul Dourish, Informatics, UC Irvine
Abstract
In “Seeing like a City,” Marianne Valverde turns to urban regulation to counter some of James Scott’s arguments about the homogenizing gaze of high modern statehood. Cities, she notes, are highly regulated, but without the panoptic order that Scott suggests. They operate instead as a splintered patchwork of regulatory boundaries – postal codes, tax assessment districts, business improvement zones, school catchment areas, zoning blocks, sanitation districts, and similar divisions that don’t quite line up. Arguments about online experience and the consequences of the Internet have a similar air to Scott’s analysis of statehood – they posit a world of consistent, compliant, and compatible information systems, in which the free flow of information and the homogenizing gaze of the digital erases boundaries (both for good and ill).
In fact, the organization of the Internet — that is, of our technologically- and historically-specific internet –is one of boundaries, barriers, and fiefdoms. We have erected all sorts of internal barriers to the free flow of information for a range of reasons, including the desire for autonomy and the extraction of tolls and rents. In this talk I want to explore some aspects of the historical specificity of our Internet and consider what this has to tell us about the ways that we talk about code and the city.
Semantic cities: Coded geopolitics and rise of the semantic web Heather Ford and Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Abstract
In 2012, Google rolled out a service called Knowledge Graph which would enable users to have their search query resolved without having to navigate to other websites. So, instead of just presenting users with a diverse list of possible answers to any query, Google selects and frames data about cities, countries and millions of other objects sourced from sites including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook and Freebase under its own banner.
For many, this heralded Google’s eventual recognition of the benefits of the Semantic Web: an idea and ideal that the Web could be made more efficient and interconnected when websites share a common framework that would allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, community, and geographic boundaries. This move towards the Semantic Web can be starkly seen in the ways that Wikipedia, as one of the foundations for Google’s Knowledge Graph, has begun to make significant epistemic changes. With a Google funded project called WikiData, Wikipedia has begun to use Semantic Web principles to centralise ‘factual’ data across all language versions of the encyclopaedia. For instance, this would mean that the population of a city need only be altered once in WikiData rather in all places where it occurs in Wikipedia’s 285 language versions.
For Google, these efficiencies provide a faster experience for users who will stay on their website rather than navigating away. For Wikipedia, such efficiencies promise to centralise the updating process so that data are consistent and so that smaller language Wikipedias can obtain automated assistance in translating essential data for articles more rapidly.
This paper seeks to critically interrogate these changes in the digital architectures and infrastructures of our increasingly augmented cities. What shifts in power result from these changes in digital infrastructures? How are semantic standardisations increasingly encoded into our urban environments and experiences? And what space remains for digital counter-narratives, conflict, and contention?
To tackle those questions, we trace data about two cities as they travel through Google’s algorithms and the Semantic Web platforms of Wikidata and Wikipedia. In each case, we seek to understand how particular reflections of the city are made visible or invisible and how particular publics are given voice or silenced. Doing so leads us to ultimately reflect on how these new alignments of code and content shape how cities are presented, experienced, and brought into being.
If you missed our first and second sessions of the Code and the City workshop video, the embedded links will lead you to them. And now is time for Session 3!
Session 3: Locative/social media
Digital social interactions in the city: Reflecting on location-based social media Luigina Ciolfi, Human-Centred Computing, Sheffield Hallam University Gabriela Avram, University of Limerick
Abstract
Location-based social media increasingly mediates social and interpersonal interactions in urban settings. Such practices become coded in software representing both the log and content of social interactions and the location to which they relate. Therefore a digital “cloud” of social interactions becomes embedded into the physical reality of the city, of its neighbourhoods, public places, cafés, transportation hubs and any other location identified by social media users (by user-initiated “check-ins” or by the content that they generate, such as photographs) and by the tools they use (for example, through automatic geo-tagging). Two sets of issues to be investigated are emerging: firstly referring to how such localised interactions are populating the algorithms and infrastructures provided by the software: how are the platform of location-based social media framing people’s perceptions and identifications of locations? How is code both facilitating and representing a set of social interactions relating to various spatial configurations? A second set of issues regards the re-materialisation of such cloud of interactions in the physical world: could it be made somehow perceivable and/or tangible in the physical world by the way in which certain environments are designed?
Overall, could new approaches to urban planning and environmental design become concerned with accommodating and facilitating these social interactions as they do so by supporting in-presence, analogue ones?
This paper will attempt to define and discuss these issues drawing both from interaction design and human-computer interaction literature on physical/digital interactions and from two preliminary empirical studies of location-based social media use in two cities.
Feeling place in the city: strange ontologies, Foursquare and location-based social media Leighton Evans, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Abstract
Certain instances of the use of location-based social media in cities can result in deep understandings of novel locations. The contributions of other users and the information pushed to users when in particular locales can help users rapidly attune themselves to places and achieve an understanding of the place. The use of a computational device and location-based social networking to achieve this understanding indicates an alteration in the achievement of placehood using computational technology. Practices and methods of understanding place can, in some situations, be delegated to the device and application. This paper explores how the moment that place is appreciated as place (that is, as a meaningful existential locale) can be reconciled with the delegation of the epistemologies of placehood to a computational device and location-based social media application. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of Foursquare users, the phenomenological appreciation of place is understood as co-constituent between the device, application and the mood of the user. Code and computational devices are contextualised as a constant foregrounding presence in the city, and the engagement of the user, device, code and data in understanding place is a moment of revealing that is co-constituent of all these elements. This exploratory paper engages Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres as a framework to understand how these four elements interact, and how that interaction of elements can orient a user to a revealing of the city that can be understood as a phenomenological revealing of place.
Cultural curation and urban Interfaces: Locative media as experimental platforms for cultural data Nanna Verhoeff, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Abstract
My contribution is concerned with the way in which urban interfaces are used for access to cultural collections – whether institutionally embedded, or bottom-up, participatory collections. Designed in code and exploring affordances of new location-based and/or mobile technologies for urban space-making, these interfaces are thought to be powerful tools for ideals of participatory urban culture. I propose to approach these “projects” as curatorial machines, as urban experimental laboratories for cultural data. This entails a threefold perspective, on curation, on code, and on principles of creative (sometimes artistic or playful) experimentation.
For this, we may remind ourselves of the curatorial project of museal and archival institutions, of preserving, and “caring” for the object, as well as creating new contexts for the object and providing access for an urban public – a field which is very much in transition as a result of current ambitions for new public engagement and ideals of participation, pervasive in all socio-economic and political regions of contemporary culture. Simultaneously we witness the current interest in the principles of data curation as the care for, interaction with, interpretation and visualisation of digital data, as the datafication and codification of culture invades all corners of urban life. Design of interfaces is central in how we can access, work with, and make meaning with digital culture. Departing from the concept of dispositif in the analysis of interfaces, I propose to bring together the fact that the interfaces are coded and designed, to (playfully) experiment with their affordances.
In my approach to this intersection of datafication of, and the proliferation of interfaces for “culture”, I aim to develop heuristic tools for critical evaluation of this phenomenon, broadly bracketed as [urban interfaces] as interfaces of cultural curation.
A Window, a message, or a medium? Learning about cities from Instagram Lev Manovich, Computer Science, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Abstract
Over last few years, tens of thousands of researchers in social computing and computational social sciences started to use available data from social networks and media sharing services (such as Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram) created by users of mobile platforms. The research uses techniques from statistics, machine learning, and visualization, among others, to analyze all kinds of patterns contained in this data and also (less frequently) propose new models for understanding the social. The examples include analysis of information propagation in Twitter, predicting popularity of photos on Flickr, proposing new sets of city neighborhoods using Foursquare users check-ins, and understanding connections between musical genres using listening data from Echonest.
In my talk I will address a fundamental question we face in doing this research: what exactly are we learning when analyzing can social media data? Is it a window into real-world social and cultural behaviors, a reflection of lifestyles of particular demographics who use mobile platforms and particular network services, or only an artifact of mobile apps? In other words – is social media a “message” or a “medium”?
I will discuss this question using three recent projects from my lab (softwarestudies.com). The projects use large sets of Instagram images and accompanying data together with data science and visualization tools. Phototrails.net (2013) analyzes 2.3 million photos from 13 global cities to investigate how different kinds of events are represented in these photos. The project also investigates if the universal affordances of Instagram app (same interface and same set of filters available to all users) result in universal digital visual language. Selfiecity.net (2014) analyzes the distinct artifact of mobile platforms – selfies. We compare thousands of selfies to see if cultural specificity of different places and cultural is preserved in this genre. Finally, our third project compares Instagram photos taken by visitors in a few major modern art museums, asking if photographs of famous works of the art differ depending on what these artworks are and where they are situated.
