CNN launched ‘Home and Away: The fallen in Afghanistan‘ with help from our friend’s at Stamen Design.

A note about the project from Eric Rodenbeck:

We’ve been working with our friends at CNN for almost a year on a project that is live as of today, a mapping of coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan called Home and Away and live on CNN.com.

The project is a sobering look at the human cost of two wars in the Middle East, and as such we’ve worked within a restrained and sober palette of blacks, whites and greys. CNN has hooked the maps up to CNN iReport and we’re hearing stories of people using the map to post memories and share stories about their lost loved ones. It’s not been the easiest subject material to work on, but we’ve come away with a keen sense of the human face of these conflicts and hope you’ll take the time to look around a bit at the stories that these kinds of maps can tell.

Check this out! City Centered is a festival of locative media and urban community spanning two busy weekends in the Tenderloin District, with a variety of interactive exhibits in and around Gray Area Foundation.

For more information about all of the events, the exhibits, and to register, visit:
http://www.citycentered.org/

Invite your friends on Facebook!

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Friday, June 11
1:00pm – 5:00pm
Symposium: Sensing the city – Data visualization and urban life
KQED, 2601 Mariposa St. SF CA

City Centered begins with a gathering of data visualization, mapping and tracking projects including installations, online maps and projected art developed with research and collaborations with neighborhoods organizations. These projects can be experienced in the Tenderloin on Sunday, June 13.

7:30pm – 10:00pm
Opening event at GAFFTA (Gray Area Foundation for the Arts), 55 Taylor St, SF CA featuring Exploring Urban Futures , an exhibition by MIT’s SENSEable Cities Lab.

Saturday, June 12
9:00am – 5:00pm
Symposium: Location, Politics and Community
KQED, 2601 Mariposa St. SF CA
Keynote by Joel Slayton, Director of ZER01 SJ Bienniel
followed by morning panels on Location as Political and afternoon panels on Location and Community.

Sunday, June 13
10:00am – 4:00pm
Public walking tours of Citycentered projects
Experience the Tenderloin community through wireless technologies, the Internet and a walks led by artists and community members.

Walks will start at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (55 Taylor Street). They will visit the Luggage Store Gallery (1007 Market Street), the Tenderloin Tech Lab (150 Golden Gate), the Shih Yu-Lang Central YMCA (387 Golden Gate) and the 900 block of O’Farrell Street.

Saturday, June 19 and Sunday, June 20th
Community education workshops
KQED, 2601 Mariposa St. SF CA
Free and open to the public. Please register here . All workshops begin at 10am.

For more information and event details, contact citycentered [at] gaffta.org

Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It offers three primary features: rapid collection and curation of what people are saying about an event, moderation of acceptable material, and speedy, reliable republishing of these conversational streams. Setup of the application is fast and easy, and made specifically for use by interactive media designers. Eddy makes data available in formats specifically designed for publishing on the web, allowing developers to quickly iterate design concepts with real world data and to launch without fuss.

Check out Eddy by Stamen Design.

The art of data visualization: Stamen Design event wrapup

By Burt Herman

The art of making sense of data — and it is truly an art — is a key element in building the future of journalism. Interactive presentations created from data can be personalized by the reader, giving a more engaging news experience. Data-based applications can also lead to new business models, through paid or subscription-based applications that give extra value to readers by providing a new dimension on news coverage.

One of the leaders in data visualization is Stamen Design, which has worked with news organizations and museums alike to help make sense of the world through its unique views of data.

Speaking to a Hacks/Hackers event this week at the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts, Stamen founder Eric Rodenbeck discussed some of his firm’s work and philosiphy.

Some highlights from the presentation:

Create maps as tools for exploration

Stamen doesn’t have any preconceptions for what they want their visualizations to show. They aim to create interfaces that allow users to come to their own conclusions about what they see. Part of this is insuring that the data they use is as complete and accurate as possible. They also don’t try to clean up outliers in their data that might appear to be unexpected noise cluttering up a visualization.

Issues of data access

When Stamen was about to release their visualization of crime data in Oakland, the city shut off access to the data pipe. Access to open data is obviously essential for these applications. This is one area where journalists and developers can work together. With their experience finding sources and doing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, reporters can help obtain the right information in the right format so that designers and developers can build a complete visualization. That takes an understanding on both sides of what’s available and what format is required.

The best data come from human actions

Data that come from actual human activity is best starting point for creating visualizations. This means information based on how people behave in the real world, not doing something like filling out surveys.

Current tools are complicated and expensive

There are some easy-to-use tools for doing this work, such as Google Maps. But when you want to go beyond just sticking red pins on a map, it can get complicated very quickly. Stamen’s projects require complex and expensive tools that aren’t easily usable by non-techies. Perhaps this will change and there are some people working in this space, such as IBM’s Many Eyes project.

Print-on-demand as a way to bridge the digital divide

Print media through small on-demand runs could be a way to bridge the digital divide and bring some of the information gleaned from data analysis to a wider audience. There have recently been some efforts to use downtime on big presses for short runs.

Want to hear more? The video of the event is embedded below, and here are some photos.

Tags: data, data visualization, design

Hacks/Hackers is proud to present an evening with Stamen Design, a design and technology studio that has earned international renown for its projects that transform data into art.

Stamen’s recent journalism-related work included a project with NBC to visualize Twitter for the Olympics, historical hurricane maps for MSNBC, and also SF Crimespotting and Oakland Crimespotting, projects to display police data. They are also looking to push the boundaries of presenting data in print.

Stamen founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck will present a selection of the firm’s recent projects and talk about their process. Before founding Stamen in 2001, Eric led the interactive storytelling and data-driven narrative effort at Quokka Sports, illustrated and designed at Wired Magazine and Wired Books, and was a co-founder of the design collective Umwow.

The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is a nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture. We are suggesting donations of $5-$20 for their generosity in providing the space, and drinks will also be available for suggested donations.

April 8th, 2010
Schedule:
7-730p: Arrive, drinks and chat
730-830p: Eric’s presentation, Q&A
830p-9: More drinks and networking
9p-whenever: Head to a nearby bar TBD for more talk with good company

About Hacks/Hackers:
Journalists call themselves “hacks,” someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code. Hacker-journalists try and bridge the two worlds.

This group is to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of their world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload, all their work has become even more crucial.

This meetup aims to help members find inspiration and think in new directions, bringing together potential collaborators for projects and new ventures.

When: Nov 11th – 6pm
Where: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
Cost: Registration is now closed, thanks for the tremendous response!

Join us for a special free symposium with all three featured artists in GAFFTA’s critically acclaimed inaugural exhibition, OPEN.

C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback and the team from Stamen Design will be on hand to shed light on the methods and meaning behind their latest creations and participate in a panel discussion showcasing their repertoire and, in context of the exhibition’s theme show, how they each explore openness, collaboration, public accessibility and participation in their work.

Program
6:00 pm Artist Presentations
-Camille Utterback
-Stamen Design
-C.E.B. Reas

7pm Break

7:15pm Panel Discussion with the artists
moderated by Richard Rinehart, Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley)

Registration is now closed, thanks for the tremendous response!

The DataSF App Showcase capitalizes on the understanding that changes are  already happening to the distribution of information and that interested developers will continue the push to create new technologies to affect city life and move away from propriety systems. The release of these data sets encourage collective participation and gives greater power to individual citizens.

Stamen Design, who has been actively working with the public data made available through this resource as well as information from the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, will debut a series of interactive and printed maps at GAFFTA’s inaugural show “OPEN”, allowing visitors to explore the Tenderloin through a series of different lenses.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) is pleased to announce its Inaugural Exhibition, OPEN, featuring the works of C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback and Stamen Design.  Including new works from three pioneers in the field of digital art, OPEN celebrates GAFFTA’s arrival as San Francisco’s leading digital arts organization and cornerstone of The City’s emerging Tenderloin Arts District.

OPEN commences with a series of fundraising events, public celebrations and workshops October 1st – 4th, with related programming running through November 18th (see full calendar of Grand Opening events below).

The multidisciplinary works in OPEN span a range of formats and techniques: from prints and sculptures to interactive video, generative processes and cartography.  While the styles of each featured artists are unique and diverse, all the works in GAFFTA’s Inaugural Exhibition exemplify the core values of our organization’s creative vision and civic mission: technology, community and openness.

Main Gallery: C.E.B Reas

C.E.B Reas is a principal player in the software art movement and co-creator of the free, open-source programming language Process­ing.  Reas’s vast body of work explores natural processes through the lens of digital media. His software installations, unique prints and relief sculptures are inspired by biology, natural intelligence and the principles of emergence. The possibilities of interaction are outlined in code, where structures evolve through a series of actions and where movements are unique elements within given parameters. Beyond his own body of work is the instrumental foundation he has laid with the creation of Processing for the growth of a new wave of software artists and design­ers.  In addition to a collection of recent works from Reas, three new pieces will be debuted at OPEN: “Network A”, “Network B” and “Surface”.

Tendorama Gallery: Camille Utterback

Camille Utterback’s interactive video piece “Liquid Time” will be the first featured work in the Tendorama Window Gallery Project, a series of rotating bi-monthly installations in the gallery’s prominent 15’ x 8’ front display windows facing Taylor Street. Utterback’s exploration is a series of pieces filmed in the surrounding neighborhood and projected back in the gallery window where the imagery of time, as well as space, is disrupted by the motions of passer-bys. This vibrant, site-specific window installation will feature video filmed in locations throughout the Tenderloin and will be viewable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by residents and visitors of the Tenderloin.

Mezzanine Gallery: Stamen Design

San Francisco-based Stamen Design will debut a series of interactive and printed pieces that allow visitors to explore the Tenderloin through a series of different maps and mappings. Using data from the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, public data made available by the City of San Francisco’s datasf.org, and other data sets, the project will provide a unique view on this fascinating neighborhood.

The Tenderloin has many faces: National Register Historic District, entry point to San Francisco’s immigrant population, notoriously vice-ridden streets, home to diverse communities and the city’s largest population of children, seat of some of the city’s oldest architecture, the only largely working-class neighborhood within the downtown area, and birthplace of the sexual liberation movement predating the Stonewall riots. Most recently, a new wave of artistic and cultural activity (including GAFFTA) is changing the face of the neighborhood once again. Using real world geographic, demographic and cartographic data, this exhibition will offer unique perspectives and unexpected insight to this complex and dynamic nexus at the center of San Francisco’s cultural and social fabric.

Grand Opening Events