On Wednesday 8th October 2014, Nathaniel Tkacz visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on “Dashboards and Data Signals”. Nathaniel is Assistant Professor in CIM at The University of Warwick. He is currently Principal Investigator for the ESRC-funded project ‘Interrogating the Dashboard’. He is author or editor of Wikipedia and The Politics of Openness, The MoneyLab Reader (forthcoming 2015), Digital Light (forthcoming 2014) and Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader.
On dashboards and data signals, Nathaniel summarised his discussion as: Screen interfaces that aggregate and visualise flows of data, namely, dashboards, are greatly increasing in number and function. They coincide with the heightened interest in information visualisation and massive claims about the transformative power of big data. David Cameron has a bespoke dashboard, as does US Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen. For the rest of us, there are a range of dashboard apps available from Apple or Google’s respective markets. The control screens one would expect to see in a Bloomberg Terminal, flight control tower or security operation – that is, in strategic and logistical spaces – is today becoming generalised and individualised. As is true of all interfaces, a dashboard is a relation. It is a relation of control, to be sure, and one that equally reflects a desire for control among the ‘data deluge’ as much as it does its achievement. But a closer look at the dashboard reveals much more than the proliferation of control. It can tell us, for example, about the changing nature of indicators, the everyday experience of data-driven life, and emerging forms of rationality, and it is these things that I will explore in this presentation.
We have the video and slides ready for you now! And we will start our seminar series for the coming year too. So do come back for latest updates on our events!
We’re proud at the Programmable City project to be launching the Dublin Dashboard, one of the first major outputs from the project. Below is a short video overview, part of the press release, and our slides from the launch.
The Dublin Dashboard provides citizens, researchers, planners, policy makers and companies with real-time information, time-series data, and interactive maps about all aspects of the city. It allows users to gain a better understand how the city is performing, to undertake evidence-informed analysis, and to improve their everyday decision making. For example, you can learn about how the city economy is performing at a glance, visualise crime levels by garda station and district, and monitor traffic flows and car parking spaces in real time.
Owen Keegan, Chief Executive for Dublin City Council officially launched the Dublin Dashboard. “The Dublin Dashboard is a great example of a local authority and a university working together for the benefit of citizens. The real value for city leaders is how the dashboard will help Dublin to monitor performance.
“A massive wealth of data is being made available, including real-time data, about the economy, transport, planning, housing, health, population, the environment, and emergency services. We are committed to further developing and improving the range of city data and information available on the platform.”
The dashboard is made up of a number of modules that can be easily used to explore hundreds of graphs, maps and apps concerning how Dublin is performing over time and in relation to other locales, what is happening in the city right now, the location of all kinds of facilities, and how to report on particular issues.
Professor Rob Kitchin, the project principal investigator, welcomed Dublin City Council’s support in making data available for the Dashboard. “The aim of the site is to empower people living and working in Dublin by providing them with easy to access intelligence about the city,” he said. “For example, users can jump onto the system before they leave for work to see how the traffic is flowing or see what spaces are available in different car parks. Prospective house buyers can explore the characteristics of an area and how close different amenities are.”
Dr Gavin McArdle, the lead developer for the Dashboard, explained that the site is based on a principle of openness. “We wanted to create an open platform where anyone can take the data we use and build their own apps, or to connect their own apps back into the site to add new functionality,” he said. “Our approach has sought to avoid re-inventing the wheel, so if a good app already exists we just link to that rather than creating our own version.”
The data underpinning the website is drawn from a number of data providers — including Dublin City Council, Dublinked, Central Statistics Office, Eurostat, and government departments, and links to a variety of existing applications. The underlying data is freely available so others can undertake their own analysis and build their own applications and visualisations.
There are plans in place to add new real-time datasets, including maps of social media, and new interactive mapping modules.
These seminar videos explore systems such as The City Dashboard and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) in terms of data collection, visualization and analysis. Joining these up creates a move towards the Smart City and via innovations in IoT a look towards augmented reality pointing towards the the creation of a ‘Smart Citizen‘, ‘the Quantified Self’ and ultimately a Smart City.
Bio: Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith is Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at The Bartlett, University College London, Reader in Digital Urban Systems and Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet Journal. He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Greater London Authority Smart London Board and Course Founder of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation and MSc in Smart Cities at University College London.
This video introduces the Programmable City. In the video Rob Kitchin outlines the aims and objectives of the project and highlights the importance of the support received from the European Research Council (ERC). Each researcher on the Programmable City team also briefly discusses their work. The video was made by the Programmable City team in order to promote the project and the ERC.
Rob provides an overview of The Programmable City project in this launch video, which includes the ideas underpinning the research and the prospective case studies. Here are links to the slides the complete program.
