Category Archives: events

Seminar: Coding Play/Crafting Code in the City

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Happy new year and welcome back!

We will be having our first seminar in the new year (2nd in the seminar series). This time, we have invited Andrea Magnorsky (Organisor and Co-founder of GameCraft and BatCat Games) and Aphra Kerr (Sociology, NUI Maynooth) to give talks on “Coding Play/Crafting Code in the City“. Looking forward to seeing you here!

Time: 16:00 – 18:00, Wednesday, 15 January

Venue: Boardroom, 2nd Floor, John Hume Building, North Campus, NUI Maynooth

Speaker bios:

Andrea Magnorsky is Senior software developer with many years of experience building a variety of products, including CRM, eCommerce, Financial, and Video Games. She is an advocate of test-driven development, and object-oriented design principles, as well as a part time lecturer on Games Programming. She is organisor and Co-founder of GameCraft Foundation which organises weekend game jams both in Ireland and internationally and co-founder of BatCat Games. BatCat Games are currently working on Honorbound, a 2D, side-scrolling beat ‘em up game focused on combat in a feudal Japanese setting. Their first game P-3 Biotic is a space shooter available on PC from GetIrishGames.ie.

Aphra Kerr is senior Lecturer and researcher in social studies of technology and media. She also teaches courses on games and play, and culture and everyday life. She has extensive research experience on the production, use and regulation of digital media, especially digital games, SNS (social networking sites) and animation, as well as the changing nature of broadcasting in the digital age. Her current research projects include ‘Cultural Production in the Digital Age’ (NSF funded network) and she is currently writing ‘Global games and transnational work’ (book under contract). For the past ten years she has been involved in running gamedevelopers.ie, a community voluntary website for the games industry in Ireland.

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Presentation Videos from ‘Open Data and Evidence Informed Decision Making’ seminar

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Here are the videos of the seminars and links to the slides, as only presenters are seen in the videos.

1. An Open Data Story (Slides, Bio), by Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, Programmable City Project, NUIM

Open Data Event Talk One from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

2. Open Government Data: The Fingal Story (Slides, Bio), by Dominic Byrne, Head of Information Technology with Fingal County Council.

Open Data Event Talk Two from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

3. Experiences as a producer, consumer and observer of open data (Slides, Bio), By Dr Peter Mooney, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funded Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, NUIM

Open Data Event Talk Three from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

Thanks to Alam Moore and to James White, both Programmable City PhD candidates for editing and posting the videos.

AAG 2014 Paper – A genealogy of data assemblages: tracing the geospatial open access and open data movements in Canada

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The following paper has been accepted for presentation at the AAG 2014 Data-based living: peopling and placing ‘big data session organised by Matt Finn (Durham University, UK), in Florida.

A genealogy of data assemblages: tracing the geospatial open access and open data movements in Canada

Authors: Tracey P. Lauriault and Rob Kitchin, NIRSA, NUI Maynooth

The field of geomatics has for decades concerned ‘big data’ about people and places, and the monitoring and managing of population, resources and territory.To better carry out this function global, regional, national and sub-national spatial data infrastructures have been built. SDIs are defined as the institutions, policies, technologies, processes and standards that direct the who, how, what and why geospatial data are collected, stored, manipulated, analyzed, transformed and shared.They are also inter-sectoral, cross-domain, inter-departmental, distributed and interoperable authoritative large biopolitical systems. As part of these projects a loose coalition of highly skilled actors have sought to open such geospatial data from state bodies for wider use.Some of these actors have been joined by a nascent open data movement.To date, however, the complex unfolding of the geospatial open access to/data movement has not been charted.In this paper we provide such a genealogical analysis, tracing the open access/data movement in Canada over the past three decades, unpacking the various overlapping, co-evolving and oppositional data assemblages.We conceive a data assemblage as a complex socio-technical system consisting of a number of inter-related elements — systemsof thought; forms of knowledge; finance; political economy; governmentalities; materialities and infrastructures; practices; organisations and institutions; subjectivities and communities; places; and marketplaces — that work together to frame how data are produced, managed, analyzed, shared and used. We suggest that such a conception and approach has utility in understanding and contextualizing the wider changing data landscape.

Presentation slides from 'Open Data and Evidence Informed Decision Making' seminar

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The 1st Programmable City Seminar filled the house with Ireland open data advocates, NUIM Students, NIRSA & NCG & StratAg & AIRO researchers, Media Studies Faculty, Computer Science Faculty, geographers, public servants, the folks at Dlublinked, technology media, the project team and others.  The audience reflected the trans-disciplinary nature of the Programmable City Project.

You can access presenter bios here and we will soon release the video recording of the event.

Stay tuned for the 2nd Seminar in January 2014.

Presentations are in order of appearance:

Seminar: Open data and evidence informed decision making

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Wednesday, November 13, 16:00-18:00

Speakers will discuss making data accessible to the public and the challenges they face in their multiple roles as citizens, public servants and researchers.

Topics include:  Citizen science, civic engagement, open data portals, Apps, hackathons, & crowdsourcing vs authoritative processes

Speakers:

  • Dominic Byrne, Head of I.T., Fingal County Council
  • Tracey P. Lauriault, Programmable City, NUIM
  • Peter Mooney, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Room 2.31, 2nd Floor Iontas Building, North Campus NUI Maynooth (Updated Map)

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