Category: Articles

Event: Precarity and hope for digitally-disadvantaged languages (and their scripts)

Description:

On March 28, I attended the digital life seminar at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. The topic was Precarity and hope for digitally-disadvantaged languages (and their scripts).

What happened at the event:

Isabelle Zaugg, the guest speaker, who was from the Institute for comparative literature and society, Columbia University, gave the audiences a brilliant speech on her topic: mass languages extinction(figure1) and her case study: what can be done to close the digital divide through an instrumental case study of Unicode inclusion and the development of supports for the Ethiopic script and its languages, including Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic.

Language extinction:

Figure 1

Mass languages extinction has been happening worldwide for a long time. In linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. The extended meaning is when the language is no longer known, including second-language speakers(“language extinction”). The reasons why it happens are colonization, globalization, urbanization, oppression, and digital communication technologies(Zaugg). As we all know, knowledge can be stored in people’s mind and books or databases. However, we can retrieve important information from the books and databases more easily than from people’s mind. If we do not record the knowledge in people’s mind in time, the knowledge will all be gone eventually as the years passed. Language and scripts are the precious wealth our ancestors left us, and we must protect them from disappearing. Nowadays, people get plenty of insights from ancient books or archives to create literary works, artworks, music, even scientific inventions. Here is a very convincing example to show why we should care about the language and scripts extinction: Tu Youyou, the winner of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015, is a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist and educator. She discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a significant breakthrough in 20th-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives around the world. The plant she found the chemical comes from, Artemisia annua L. (sweet wormwood), was used to treat fevers perhaps caused by malaria as early as the third or fourth century CE (Totelin, Laurence). Tu discovered the properties of artemisinin (qinghaosu in Chinese) after reading ancient Chinese texts from The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies that dated back to 341 B.C. listing medicinal herb preparations. If the book did not survive during the thousand years, a much longer time would be needed to find the insights and exact Artemisia to treat malaria.

Case study: Ethiopic language and script

Figure 2

From Zaugg’s speech, I learned that language is a system of communication used by a particular community. A script is written characters. Languages and scripts do not always have a one-to-one relationship(Zaugg). Some scripts are gradually becoming obsolete. The invention of Unicode helps to record and save the scripts. Unicode(figure2) is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing system(“Unicode”).

Figure 3

In Zaugg’s case study(figure3), mixed methods have been used in the Ethiopic language and script research. The common language of Ethiopia is Amharic, with 345 letters. Its history can be traced back to the 4th century A.D. and it is one of the oldest words in the world today. Because the alphabet contains far more letters than the 26 letters in the Latin alphabet and is complex and difficult to distinguish, it is difficult to be compatible with modern science and technology communication networks. In 2004, with the participation of linguists and scientists from Ethiopia and the United States, and professors from the University of California, researchers reduced the total number of letters from 345 to 210, and then further reduce them into 28 basic alphabetic letters in Unicode. With this development, it has become possible to use Amharic to communicate in text on mobile phones, and Ethiopia’s communications have entered the 21st century rapidly.

Figure 4

Zaugg oversees Unicode and ISO subcommittee working group, interviews with Ethiopic digital pioneers and linguists, and analyzes the non-traditional content of Ethiopic script and languages choices on Facebook, Wikipedia and .et country code top-level web domain. Some recommendations are put forward to save the Ethiopic language and script(figure4): Linguists should collaborate with IT professionals. Governments should optimize the Ethiopic keyboard standard and produce products that implement a free, open-source standard. International IT companies should support language diversity as part of corporate social responsibility(Zaugg).

Reflection:

Technology can mitigate language/script extinction and help to preserve culture heritages. Thanks to technology, scientists can save scripts by converting them to Unicode and spread it through the internet. However, technology is a double-edged sword. While it is helping to preserve languages and scripts, it can harm them in a way. When we were kids, we did not have so many digital devices as the kids have now, such as phones, pads, and laptops. We wrote our research paper on actual paper. We write a lot. Nowadays, most of the keyboards have the character/word suggestion function. A lot of young kids do not need to write by hands and they sometimes do not know how to write actual words because the keyboard suggests them the correct words all the time. In some cases, new immigrants in America cannot communicate with their grandparents smoothly in their native languages. Their grandparents come from the countries which English is not their mother tongue. The young generation cannot inherit the speaking and writing ability of their own languages from their parents or grandparents, therefore, native languages cannot be passed on. The young generation will lose their identity in a way and lose a sense of community and belongingness. In the article Digital Cultural Heritage: Concepts, Projects, and Emerging Constructions of Heritage, Marija Dalbello says: “The significance is related to cultural motion and public endorsement; significance processes are the basis for cultural inventions and collectivist traditions”(1). Only when the public realizes the severity of languages extinction and the significance of cultural heritage, can the technical professionals and the society take actions together to make progress on preventing the language extinction and the loss of cultural heritage.

References:

Zaugg,Isabelle. ‘Precarity and hope for digitally-disadvantaged languages (and their scripts)’. 2019. Lecture.

Wikipedia contributors. “Language death.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 Mar. 2019. Web. 31 Mar. 2019.

Totelin, Laurence. “Could Ancient Textbooks Be the Source of the next Medical Breakthrough?” The Conversation, 13 Sept. 2018, theconversation.com/could-ancient-textbooks-be-the-source-of-the-next-medical-breakthrough-48612.

Wikipedia contributors. “Unicode.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 31 Mar. 2019. Web. 31 Mar. 2019.

Dalbello, Marija. (2009). “Digital Cultural Heritage: Concepts,Projects, and Emerging Constructions of Heritage.” Proceedings of the Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA)conference, 25-30 May, 2009.

Xi Chen INFO 601-02 Assignment 3 Event

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Fellows Colloquium—Tracing Objects: Translation and Transmission

The Met Fellowship Program draws leading and emerging scholars and practitioners from fields such as museology, academia, archaeology, education and scientific research. Since the program’s inception in 1951, the fellows’ research has deeply examined The Met collection and have significantly added to ongoing discourse in their fields.

This spring, current fellows present their research and explore related scholarly topics in a series of nine colloquia. I attended one of these sessions with the topic “Tracing Objects: Translation and Transmission” on 15 March 2019. The colloquia featured fellows Krisztina Ilko, Tommaso Mozzati, Max Bryant, Brian Martens, Georgios Makris, Maria Harvey and Chassica Kirchhoff.

New Evidence on the Original Materials, Former Construction, and Late Collecting History of the Patio of Vélez Blanco

Tommaso Mozzati, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Retrieved March 21, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/199003. Image in Public Domain.

Mozzati’s research examines the marble patio originally part of the Castillo de Vélez-Blanco, now housed in the entrance of The Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library to showcase the museum’s Italian Renaissance statues. The Patio of Vélez Blanco was built at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Pedro Fajardo y Chacón and remains a matter of conjecture today. Mozzati’s archival investigation led him to an unpublished drawing from 1805 that shows the patio’s original composition, in situ in the Spanish fortress. Reflecting on this drawing, Mozzati highlighted questions of authenticity as with little to no archival records before, the changes made over time with the movement of the patio can only be supposed. The drawing differed significantly from the patio in The Met with various additions and shifts, emphasizing the compromised state of the original and the mutability of art to fit the whims of the owner. Mozzati thus brought up the idea of ‘trans-content’ with regards to the patio’s importance in the context of early modern Spanish architecture and its new meaning and significance now that it is situated in Fifth Avenue.

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To complement the comprehensive art-historical study started in 2017 by Tommaso Mozzati, Andrew W. Mellon fellow in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, petrographic and stable isotopes analyses are now being used to pinpoint the provenance of the marbles, identify later replacements, and reconstruct the complex history of the patio since it left Spain in early 1900 for Blumenthal’s house in New York City. Image 1. Velez-Blanco patio photographed at the Met in 1964, when it was first opened to the public. 41.190.482, Bequest of George Blumenthal, 1941. Image 2. Two samples of marble from the patio, imaged using a petrographic microscope. #metscience #themet #metscientificresearch #Europeansculptureanddecorativearts #velezblanco #marmolmacael #almeria #castlesofspain #whitemarble

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In addition to archival research, Mozzati examined the provenance of the marble used in the current iteration of the patio seeking to use scientific analysis to determine the structure of the courtyard before its sale in 1904 to French dealer J. Goldberg. I found Mozzati’s research particularly interesting in his multifaceted approach in studying the history and authenticity of the patio. Mozzati lamented that the patio is now a mere reminder of the original though still prized for its sculptural and architectural value in the context of the Spanish Renaissance. It is often taken for granted the role of museums to present authenticity and truth. There is much to learn in constantly questioning the information I am presented with even with respectable organizations and institutions.

Imported Art and Design in the Early Practice of the Adam Brothers

Max Bryant, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Dining room from Lansdowne House, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Retrieved March 21, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/32.12/.
Tapestry Room from Croome Court, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Retrieved March 21, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/58.75.1-22/.

The Adam brothers created exemplars of design, composite period displays that were an important stage in the development of modern museum culture. Bryant studied two of their displays from late-eighteenth century London: the tapestry room from Croome Court and the dining room from Lansdowne House, now being reconstructed in The Met’s new British galleries. Period rooms afford the museum visitor a chance to experience the furnishings, objects and decor within as related to each other in time, place and style in a way that isolating them cannot. Though many such rooms were originally designed as a proof of opulence, the objects within might not be curated well but fulfilled the aesthetic requirements.

Museums now question the contemporary resonance of such period rooms, if aesthetic quality or historic quality takes greater precedence. A moral element has now emerged that raises issues of populism, imported luxury and the attachment to the past.

To Conclude,

Many of the fellows had brought up issues of the transmission and translation of art between cultures in their presentation, befitting the overarching theme of the event. Their research took in depth studies of The Met’s collection in relation to various themes, locations and histories. As such, misinformation seems a underlining hindrance to their research with either little archival resources or when the translation of art could have had more verification.

Adorno states the authentic is a judgement of value and a manichean one that pits unobjective concepts against each other and leads to constant hairsplitting (Adorno, 1973). The criteria of authenticity is not necessarily objective where the museum seems an inauthentic device trying to frame ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ objects and ideas within contexts determined by them. Museums might argue that they are the last guardians of the past, in possession of relics for the benefit of scholars to study and people to view, where their reconstruction of historical sites can now be easily marveled all under one roof.

The event has opened my eyes to various museology and art history issues that I think also apply to information science where information verification and authenticity have become large issues in the community.

References

Adorno, T.W. (1973). The jargon of authenticity. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Bruner, E. M. (1956). Cultural Transmission and Cultural Change. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 12(2): 191-199. https://doi.org/10.1086/soutjanth.12.2.3629114

Hede, A. & Thyne, M. (2010). A journey to the authentic: Museum visitors and their negotiation of the inauthentic. Journal of Marketing Management. 26(7-8), 686-705. https://doi.org/10.1080/02672571003780106

Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London: Routledge.

INFO 601-02 (Assignment 3 / Event Attendance) – Jamie Teo

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Event NYC Data School: Can open contracting hold smart cities accountable?

The panelists (from left): Greg Jordan-Detamore (Sunlight Foundation), Katya Abazajian, (Sunlight Foundation), Paul Rothman, (NYC Mayor’s Office), Zack Brisson (Reboot)

On a Saturday in March during NYC’s Open Data Week, NYC School of Data hosted their annual community conference to “demystify the policies and practices around civic data, technology, and service design.” With my BA in Geography, experience as an AmeriCorps VISTA, and current status as a Pratt IXD student, it’s not surprising I found myself drawn to a session entitled, “Can open contracting hold smart-cities accountable?”

On the 7th anniversary of NYC passing the Open Data Law, the hour-long discussion brought together 4 panelists: Zack Brisson, Principal at Reboot; Katya Abazajian, Open Cities Director at Sunlight Foundation;  Paul Rothman, Senior Product Manager at NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and Greg Jordan-Detamore at the Sunlight Foundation.

I’ll reflect on the event in hopes to continue the conversation on transparency and accountability in government tech, particularly smart-city technologies, amidst the rising tide of surveillance capitalism.

via Vecteezy

Who builds smart cities?

Upon opening the panel, Mr. Jordan-Detamore of Sunlight Foundation explained regulating, or even discussing the regulation of, smart-cities is difficult because the term is a broad buzzword with no real definition. For the purpose of the discussion, the panelists clarified their meaning of smart-cities as “urban centers being used to collect data and then things being done with that data for some purpose.” Admittedly still pretty broad, but somewhere to start!

The panel really focused on the relationship between those who make the actual technology, and the governments who purchase them. Smart city technologies are built by private technology corporations, or vendors, like Google, but once the city begins using them, it’s often unclear who owns the resulting data. The speakers explained the reason cities purchase technology from private corporations is pretty obvious: Governments often lack the organizational infrastructure and internal expertise to build on their own (remember Seattle’s failed independent bike-share). One panelist asked, “I mean, how great would it be if your city’s government was as efficient as Amazon?”

The government-vendor relationship

Early on, the panelists underscored the imbalanced relationship between the government and corporate entities who enter into smart city technology contracts. Governments looking to procure a product “never really have the upper hand,” explained Abazajian from the Sunlight Foundation, as they don’t have the same technological expertise. The Sunlight Foundation’s Jordan-Detamore stressed that governments, especially smaller municipalities without the infrastructure of, say a Boston, are especially vulnerable of being swindled by the shininess of Silicon Valley.

While watching an episode of VICE News Tonight a week after the panel, I saw the disastrous potential of manipulative contracting in the town of Jackson, Mississippi. The manufacturing conglomerate Siemens sold 65,000 water “smart meters” to the city for $90 million dollars in 2013. Fast forward to 2019: the water meters don’t actually work and started a billing crisis that has grown into the city’s $25 million debt. About the dynamic between the city and Siemens, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba told VICE News, “It’s akin to someone selling you the most expensive car that they have on the lot, and understanding at the time that they’re selling it to you that you can’t afford to buy it; you don’t understand how to operate it, but if they can get you to purchase it, they will.”

Via piktochart

Behind closed contracts

There’s a lot of cloudiness around the ethics of smart city technologies because their contracts are, more often than not, closed. Closed contracts that limit the details to the public are the norm, and tech companies want to keep it that way. Before this panel, I (slightly embarrassingly) had no idea there was even an option of opening them.

Abazajian explains, “vendors make the argument their proprietary technologies warrant a closed contract, but in reality, they don’t need to be.” There’s a broad range of contract data that’s not sensitive, not private, and not proprietary. Lack of transparency in contracts was unanimously cited as a major issue in protecting civil liberties by the panelists.

Would an open contract have saved Jackson, Mississippi? Via CC.

Advocating for open contracts

The panelists from the Sunlight Foundation explained their new open contract initiative, which helps city governments open the process of procuring smart city technologies. On a functional level, opening a contract means giving the public access to smart-city contract data in a standardized way, so advocates and other community members can see how public money is spent.

Sunlight Foundation operates under the notion that the public should be involved in the rollout of smart city technologies from the start because they are the major stakeholders. A vendor should not be able to come in and “trample the public’s right to information,” one panelist quickly quipped. “Open contracting creates feedback loops”, explains Brisson, which “helps infuse community input into the plan.”

While watching the segment on Jackson’s water bill crisis, I couldn’t stop wondering what would have happened if the contract was public to begin with. Public outcry could have halted the overly ambitious and exploitative plan that sunk the small town into massive debt.

References:

A $90 million “smart” system has totally screwed up these residents’ water bills – VICE News. (n.d.). Retrieved March 21, 2019, from https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbw8qy/a-dollar90-million-smart-system-has-totally-screwed-up-these-residents-water-bills

Naughton, J. (2019, January 20). “The goal is to automate us”: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. The Observer. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook

There Is No Such Thing as a Smart City – The Atlantic. (n.d.). Retrieved March 21, 2019, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/stupid-cities/553052/

Why good policies go wrong: Seattle’s botched bikeshare model | Apolitical. (n.d.). Retrieved March 21, 2019, from https://apolitical.co/solution_article/good-policies-go-wrong-seattles-botched-bikeshare-model/

Posted on by Nora Gordon 0

Event: Data Through Design

I attended an event at the NEWLAB called Data Through Design, which was split in three separate sections, an exhibit viewing, artists discussion, and panel discussion. This event was an independently organized exhibition for data and cartography where they introduced a few artists who have used data in their projects and a panel discussion based on proxies was discussed. I’ve participated in the entire event and gained a lot of knowledge from the events discussion based on what the artists and panelists said throughout the event. This event was a high interest to me because I wanted to gain much more understanding in data collection from online data websites and how it can be used for a design project. I have taken a data visualization course in programming on my undergraduate years and have knowledge in collecting data but I wanted to learn more. Back when I took my data visualization course, I was very amazed in how data sets can be used in a program to determine a solution and get information. Even though I have knowledge in data collection this event caught most of my attention because of its panelist discussion in everything is a proxy. The panel was a discussion about proxies in data models where they are used in the complexity of getting a specific data set that works best for your project or needs. Proxies is everything is their theme in the discussion and this is because proxies are the information of things around us that can be brought together in order to be used in special work for the society. In my understanding the event is teaching the audience to grasp knowledge on data and how data is useful to the people and their works.

At the event I saw an exhibition viewing. In the exhibition there were a couple of projects created by the artists who were in speaking at the event. There was piece of works called temporal views of a bike lane, collision course, cards against hate, and a few more. All of these exhibits have data collection in them that was used to be created. For example, one of the exhibits called cards against hate showed cards that had different information about none hate crime in the week based on religion, race, and other subjects. The artists who created these cards used a data collection to get the information they needed to showcase their work. The artists who created this piece of work spoke to the audience and said that the data sets they used helped them get what they wanted and they agreed that the data collection of information would change the society in many ways.

The event talked about how useful data is helpful to the people and the design projects that are being developed by artists. Data is a big informational source that never ends. You can use data for anything you want. But mostly people use it to find solutions, make life simple for its users, and create a better living for the society. The information within data is very big and you can find about anything on the topic you choose to explore on. I believe that the information within data is useful in many ways and will help the people or users interact with products that use data in a much effective way. There is still a lot more information to be added to data. It is a growing branch that has no limits. Data is big and is growing more and more every day.

Proxies or data collection is a good tool because it helps users connect with information in a faster and smarter way. As Jim Martin and Raik Zaghloul say,

Collection management is profoundly affected by rapid changes in the library profession. While this provides librarians with opportunities to connect users with information, it also demands the ongoing development of new skills (Martin & Zaghloul, p. 313).

Even though I have knowledge in data collection, I have learned a lot by going to this event. This event should go on more throughout the years as technology is developing every day. The event has given me the understanding of how data or proxies is a big solution to the society. I believe that the event changed the way I see data in the way that data not only has been used at libraries, programs, but also on design works like cards against hate. Many of the words spoken about data at the event gave me the expertise on how data collection is used in about almost everything that we can think of.

Reference

Jim, M. and Raik, Z. (2011). Planning for the acquisition of information recourses management core competencies. New Library World, 112(7/8), 313-320. Retrieved from URL https:// doi.org/10.1108/03074801111150440

Link to event: http://2019.datathroughdesign.com/

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Observation of Future of Physical Retail

When considering the kind of information environment, I wanted to observe, I wanted to observe the evolution of physical retail experience. I chose this because retail environment is experiencing a lot of changes after the emergence of e-commerce. Ground breaking retailers are seeing an incentive in looking priceless and administration to make a vivid shopping knowledge intended to pull at heartstrings and catch client dedication, notwithstanding for a brief timeframe. Developing innovation makes it less demanding to mix the physical and advanced retail understanding to give better knowledge into client conduct and expectation — and make a really special vivid experience for their clients. Retailers can utilize this total picture to make an increasingly customized shopping knowledge, drive transformations, improve client administration, and set themselves apart from their opposition. 

 I decided to go to the Nike Flagship store in Midtown on a weekday afternoon as it provides knowledge in a situation that is as responsive as digital.  This Six-story space is called as the “House of Innovation 0000”, a very first effort of Nike to bring retail to life. 

 While walking on the fifth avenue, the whole black building with frosted patterned glass panels and a huge Nike logo grabs my attention. The architecture itself gives information of from where the entrance is. The red glass door opens up to a sci-fi art installation of computers having heat maps and holographic shoes stating the identity of the brand. The store consisted of young visitors. The first floor is treated as innovative museum of Nike. It consisted of information of design process on screens and showing prototypes of previous shoe designs and the latest designs for sneakers. It also encouraged people to download its app to get the full experience of store. There was a digitally heat mapped sports court installed inside where people could experience their shoes before purchasing it. The tiles on the Arena can be reworked to have new spaces and designs; as the choice develops, the store format can advance as well, making the House of Innovation 000 an adjustable store in each feeling of the word. I think this was a really interesting feature because only in retail you can understand the feel of the shoes and nothing better than playing the game of choice in it to understand the comfort of it.  

I was directed to the second floor where there was Women’s clothing section. Here there were barcodes besides every product. People need to scan that barcode to purchase the product or get the desired size in the changing rooms. This helped people to roam around the store without carrying the weight of the cart. The whole process of shopping was digitized which made retail fun. Similar facilities were provided in the Men’s clothing section on the third floor. 

On the fourth floor was the shoes section. It had a sneaker bar and various designs in shoes. A full customization wing of Sneaker Bar, conveying on Nike’s spearheading DIY soul and offering an abundance of bands, textures, decals and more with which to adorn a wide determination of consistently invigorated footwear. People could customize the shoes themselves. The younger generation and shoe fanatic people were really enjoying it.  Even in this section there was a barcode besides the shoes which should be scanned using the Nike app to get it of size and choice. This barcode scanning is a really a great feature because then I need not search for a representative and wait for the whole process of finding a shoe of choice.  

This leads me to the last floor of the building where there is a Nike Expert Studio. This feature of one-on one joint collaboration with expert stylist can be booked by Nike members in-store and on the Nike App. I think this section was very VIP section where people could interact with stylist and get customized clothes or clothes that suits their body type or style. Very few people were coming to this section. I personally think this section was not getting as much attention as previous ones. They have not given much information about it even while entering the store. 

Observing this whole space was really interesting. It appeared that some visitors were there to only experience the innovative retail space. They were curious about the interactive features and the technology used in the store. Despite the unfamiliarity of technology some people were inherent on using it as someone would think they were stealing from the store. The young generations were very engaged with the technology. But the older generation was sticking to the conventional style of retail. 

As Bates stated in Fundamental Forms of Information, we will simply consider subjective experience, including the experience of remembering, to be the first on a list of kinds of embodied information that result from neural encoded information. I really enjoyed observing people first taking the experience of the product and having hands on customization which then lead them to buy the product. I observed what Marchionni said changes in the human–information interaction entities relate to learning or other mental state changes in the human and usage changes in the information object. I could sense the different between interaction with technology of different generation which depends on both urge of learning and mental state. 

I trusted it is the ideal convergence of individuals, innovation, and style in one space. The space had the capacity to speak with its city through individuals and advanced administrations, welcoming a discussion that is synchronized to the client.  From my perspective the whole technological process is overwhelming if you are trying it for the first time. But if this is the future of physical retail, people will get used to it eventually. Overall it was a great initiative taken by Nike Team. 

References: 

https://news.nike.com/news/nike-nyc-house-of-innovation-000

Marcia J. Bates Fundamental Forms of Information, Journal of the American Society for the Information Science and Technology, 57(8):1033–1045, 2006. 

G. Marchionini / Library & Information Science Research 30 (2008) 165–174. 

Richa Kulkarni, INFO 601-02

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NYC Subway and Human Interaction

New York City’s Subway is one of the oldest and most efficient public transit systems that the world has seen. It started operating in the year 1904 and runs 24 hours on every day of the year. The Subway transit is also the most used metro system of the world, by a countless and diverse population. 

The Subway lines run through Manhattan and branch out into the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx. It is a network of extensive structures and many junctions, of which I have made observation of one – Times Square 42nd Street/Port Authority Bus Terminal(PABT). 

This Subway station complex is located under PABT and Times Square at the intersection of 42nd Street, 7th and 8th avenues, and Broadway. Every train has a distinct color and number or alphabet associated with it. The 42nd Street Times Square station offers access to multiple lines. 

42ndTrainStation-trains

All the lines are bi-directional, running towards uptown and downtown. There are local lines which stop at every station, and there are express lines that make stops at fewer stations. Most lines, except a few, run 24 hours with higher frequency on weekdays.

NAVIGATION AND TECHNOLOGY 

The Subway system has a very well designed way-finding system which poses hardly any challenge to its users. It uses consistent visual language, universally accepted icons, and smart placement to make navigation through the enormous space easy. All signages are on non-reflective black surfaces with white legible sans serif text. The signages mark uptown and downtown trains with their specific icon. Use of icons and text together reinforces information, the “S” with “Shuttle” for instance. While the train icons are invariably placed on the right of the text, icons for ramps and wheelchairs go consistently on the left. 

A user’s initial point of contact with the Subway system’s technology is at the entrance where he finds a Metrocard vending machine. The machine accepts cash, debit or credit cards and is effortless with touch screen and comprehensible instructions. The system is quick and economical with $1 for the Metrocard itself, and preset values that the user can choose from to put charge on the card. Moving further the commuter enters the station through turnstiles which use a card reading technology. 

Metrocard-vending-machines

Throughout the Subway premises Customer Assistance Intercoms and Emergency Intercoms are easily accessible. The smart positioning of speakers allow system announcements to be audible all over, without any hindrance from the commotion. The station has Subway maps at frequent spots and Neighbourhood maps and entrances/exits. 

Maps-at-Subway-entrance-exit

Moreover, a recent addition of interactive touchscreens has augmented navigation. These all-in-one customer information devices allow one to select a destination station, in response to which the screens display possible routes with time estimates. Aside from information on train schedules these screens also offer recommendations for points of interest at select locations, information about escalators and elevators, outages and train delays, or if planned work is coming up. However, commuters don’t seem to use this technology as often. 

Interactive-screen-at-Subway-platform

All platforms have digital screens displaying ETA for their respective trains. 

Screen-displaying-trains-ETA
S

There are multiple apps designed specifically to aid Subway navigation, for example MTA Subway Time.

The 42nd Street Station, as all Subway stations, has several entry/exit points spanning across surrounding blocks with supplemental northwest, southwest, northeast and southeast corners, marked “NW”, “SW”, “NE” and “SE” respectively. There are two underground passageways to PABT allowing easy transfer to interstate buses.

CONVENIENCE AND EXPERIENCE

ATMs, convenience stores and trashcans are easy to locate. The subway is safe, and well monitored by surveillance cameras and police. Several posters advertising tv shows, web series and brands among other things, offer a sense of familiarity and make the experience less daunting. Also serving the same purpose are the artworks on the walls. Musical performances are a regular affair at the station, which also becomes a platform for artists to showcase and sell art. This makes the Subways less monotonous and more entertaining. Yellow strips at the edge of the platforms mark a safe distance from the rail tracks. These strips are embossed to prevent slipping. A set of benches are placed at the platforms for senior citizens and physically challenged.

Advertising-posters
Musical-performances
Artworks

An attempt to incorporate inclusive design has been made through the use of braille, ramps and elevators, but it fails to be efficient. 

inefficient-inclusive-design

ON THE TRAIN 

Every train’s icon, number/alphabet and route is visible on it. Red bulbs light up on both sides of the automatic doors when they are open. Many advertising posters on the insides of the trains offer comfort and interaction. There are poles and railings for standing commuters to hold onto. Newer trains have digital display of the trains route with current and next station highlighted, but the old trains only have a poster of the trains’ routes. To complement this, system announcements alert the passengers of the upcoming and current stations. There is priority seating for disabled and senior passengers. Clear instructions for events of emergency are displayed with assistance intercoms and emergency brakes.  

Posters-in-train

OBSTACLES AND SUGGESTIONS

The Subway system is extremely well planned and functional, and given its technological structure manned stations are barely needed. Although, a considerable number of users are not tech-savvy. There is a lost and found unit, but without relevant assistance chances of items being turned in are slim. There could be a dedicated station for a personnel within the premises for further help. Nonetheless, NYC Subway system is an exemplary public space design with minimum room for errors.

References:

NYC Subway 101
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How Netflix Learns What You Like

On Thursday, February 28th, NYU Tandon School of Engineering held a live streaming event featuring a talk given by Netflix’s Director of Machine Learning, Tony Jebara. The topic covered was “Machine Learning for Personalization”, which Jebara provided company use cases and solutions for content personalization.

Netflix Director of Machine Learning, Tony Jebara

Netflix, a streaming media-service, is well regarded within the machine learning field for developing impressive machine learning models that incorporate advanced feedback mechanisms to train and improve those models.

According to the Director of Machine Learning, Tony Jebara, every Netflix user’s experience is unique across a range of personalized content. A few examples of personalized content provided by Jebara were rankings, homepage generation, promotions, image selections, searches, advertisement displays, and push notifications.

Content Personalization

Content personalization is a technique leveraged by many companies, across many industries, for the business of either creating content, distributing it or both. Content encompasses everything from online articles to advertisements. In Digital Disconnect, McChesney describes that the popular digital method “personalizes content for individuals, and the content is selected based on what is considered most likely to assist the sale” (p.157).

Entrepreneur lauded Netflix and other media companies who are successfully leveraging machine learning to develop custom experiences but notes a dichotomy which plagues user’s and their preferences. The trade-off between conveniently custom experiences or inconveniently anonymous reintroductions. On one side, users face issues surrounding privacy or unpleasant information dictation.

Opposite to their praises as personalization gurus, Fast Company highlighted some of the negative criticisms Netflix has also received. When companies curate the content users consume, there’s a risk of receiving biased information whether it be political or racial. Berkowitz opens with, “How companies advertise to you says a lot about how they see you” when referring to the racial bias in the algorithms used by not only Netflix, in this case, but many of the other companies working to deploy advanced content personalization algorithms.

“Filter Bubbles”

Regarding the politically charged dictation of content, Castells remarks, “The networks themselves reflect and create distinctive cultures. Both they and the traffic they carry are largely outside national regulation. Our dependence on the new modes of informational flow gives to those in a position to control them enormous power to control us. The main political arena is now the media, and the media are not politically answerable” (p. 34).

McChesney adds how these practices also lead to an issue he considers the “personalization bubble” or what he specifically alludes to as the “filter bubble” (p.157). Users are trapped in an experience they believe to be unique or new but is perpetuated by the same content delivery—just done differently (p. 70).

McChesney references Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: How the New Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think when stating, “Pariser’s Filter Bubble documented how the Internet is quickly becoming a personalized experience wherein people get different results on Google searches for identical queries, based on their history” (p.157).

When Netflix Intervenes

In his talk, Jebara claimed that “prediction is valuable but actual intervention is what we want to understand.” Their algorithms are two-fold—ensuring that experiences are uniquely specific without providing recommendations that are too specific, which may lead to either a negative user experience and a potential unsubscribe from the service.

We’ve all experienced moments of interacting with a digital platform that, over time and with enough data aggregation, begins to recommend content or display ads across devices and sites outside the ownership of the originating platform. If frightened enough, we may have even gone as far as to deleting our browser cookies, adjusting our privacy settings or even unsubscribing from the service.

Algorithm Feedback

Jebara mentioned that a multitude of mixed-method machine learning algorithms are implemented to hone everything from predictive analytics and image curation to user-enforced restrictions and feedback mechanisms.

Jebara described their method take rate as a curatorial feedback strategy which tests different personalization experiences on several users to determine which of the content shown resulted in an actual viewing.

This strategy uniquely prefers the measurement of the number of viewers that strategy worked for over the number of viewers a specific piece of content was shown to. Jebara noted this method enables Netflix experts to learn from users by letting them show what content they prefer and in which ways they’re drawn to recommendations.

User Generated Feedback

This is a major shift from their previous user experience of providing users with the ability to ranking rank content using a star ranking system. Overtime and through observation, Netflix realized they couldn’t rely on that ranking system as a source of truth for which content users ranked highly versus which they’d prefer to watch. Jebara added users were not truthful in their telling of which content they preferred. Shifting away from user interaction to user observation has enabled a greater foundation for developing recommendation systems.

Conclusion

As content personalization algorithms advance, consumers will become a more passive actor in teaching content personalization algorithms. Every attempt at restricting interaction with such algorithms will lead only to yet another loophole identified by machine learning experts. How those companies manage those algorithms and exploit those loopholes are examples of the digital power dynamic which exists between the content generators and the content consumers.

References:

Berkowitz, Joe. “Is Netflix racially personalizing artwork for its titles?One writer’s experience with Netflix’s title art has us wondering whether the company is quietly using race in its algorithm for visually recommending films”. Fast Company (2018). https://www.fastcompany.com/90253578/is-netflix-racially-personalizing-artwork-for-its-titles

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Wiley-Blackwell (2010). https://lms.pratt.edu/pluginfile.php/876462/mod_resource/content/1/manuel_castells_the_rise_of_the_network_societybookfi-org.pdf

Chmielewski, Dawn C. “Netflix’s Use of Artwork Personalization Attracts Online Criticism”. Deadline (2018).  https://deadline.com/2018/10/netflixs-artwork-personalization-attracts-online-criticism-1202487598/

McChesney, Robert W. Digital Disconnect. The New Press (2013): 63-171.

Wirth, Karl. “Netflix Has Adopted Machine Learning to Personalize Its Marketing Game at Scale: Here’s how you can humanize marketing strategies”. Entrepreneur (2018). https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311931

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Preserving our Digital Afterlives

This morning, as I was scrolling through Instagram, I came across an interesting post by Oroma Elewa, a Nigerian-born visual and performance artist, writer and director. Under the Instagram post, Elewa captioned “Please make this go viral. Don’t love and follow me secretly. Show me you care. Do not let me be erased. This is very painful.” Elewa was addressing a viral quote she had originated in 2014 on her personal Tumblr that has been repeatedly falsely misattributed to Frida Kahlo since 2015: “I am my own muse. The subject I know best. The subject I want to better.” If you Google that quote, you’ll find hundreds of images, articles, products, and social media posts attributing it to Frida Kahlo. In the comment section, people who followed Elewa through her journey as an artist on social media, supported her while others were skeptical. Frida Kahlo, an iconic artist and figure in popular culture and an inspiration to all women of many different backgrounds, didn’t say those words–but, who would believe that Elewa originated the quote?

As a young rising artist, Elewa was inspired by Frida Kahlo’s actual words: “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” Although this is an issue of the spread of misinformation and the blurred lines of ownership and authenticity in the online world, Elewa’s fear of erasure brought to mind Michele Valerie Cloonan’s concept of the paradox of preservation and the transient or ever-changing manner of one’s digital remains. Cloonan wrote that “it is impossible to keep things the same forever. To conserve, preserve, or restore is to alter” (235). Frida Kahlo is not alive to disprove that she ever said Elewa’s quote. With endless digital copies of her image being attached to the quote, how can we manage to support Elewa’s claim? How can Elewa make sure her work lives on without the fear of being erased, silenced or altered in the digital world? And most importantly, how can we protect and preserve our digital afterlives?

The Digital Afterlives Symposium was held at Bard Graduate Center in honor of Professor David Jaffee who was the head of New Media Research. Prof. Jaffee was instrumental in introducing and creating a new direction for the Digital Media Lab at BGC. After his death, not only was his legacy as a leading historian missed, but he also left behind a plethora of files and media pertaining to his personal and professional projects throughout his life. The topic of the symposium came about while his late daughter and a few of his colleagues started a project to archive and preserve Jaffee’s work. This endeavor has led to the exploration of finding innovative ways to protect, prolong and preserve our digital afterlives and the impact technology has on the sustainability of our digital projects as well as the privacy and accessibility of our personal information.

Technology has become an extension of our physical world. As we increasingly develop and interact with technologies, we end up with a constant re-experiencing of the past. At the symposium, Abby Smith Rumsey, an independent scholar, spoke about her research paper on how memory creates identity and how humans create artificial memory through the use of digital technology. Our transformation from an analog to a digital environment has made us reliant on digital technologies to preserve memory and be reminded of the past. And there is a moral weight of dealing with a person’s memory, especially if the person can be immortalized in the digital world. In her presentation called, “Death, Disrupted,” Tamara Kneese spoke on the proliferation of “dead users” in the online world, particularly in social media. Social media is so embedded into our lives that it has become a space for ritualized mourning, memorialization and perhaps immortalization as personal profiles transform into actual shrines after users’ deaths.

But, not everything lasts forever in the digital world. Rosenzweig pointed out that the “life expectancy of digital media [can] be as little as 10 years, [and even so] very few hardware platforms and software programs last that long” (742). Platforms will eventually disappear over time. MySpace, Orkut, Friendster and OpenDiary are all remnants of the old digital environment. Inevitably, we have to address the issue of digital decay. In her presentation at the symposium, Robin Davis, an Emerging Technologies and Online Learning Librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, proved the fragility of the digital world through her case study on the lifespans of digital humanities scholarship projects that were created in 2005. She found that only half of the 60 DH projects she studied were accessible online 10 years later. In some cases, she found that other projects had a shelf life of 5 years due to issues with hosting and the lack of funding while a couple of web projects were even taken over by fraudulent companies. Davis reiterated that digital scholars need to build a preservation plan into their projects and consider the longevity of their choice to create content for the web.

So, ultimately, our digital remains will disappear, but can individuals maintain and manage their own digital data in the hopes of living on as information after death? Is it possible to save everything? Rosenzweig wrote about “the fragility and promiscuity of digital data,” which requires yet more rethinking–about whether we should be trying to save everything…” (739). The debate over whether it is worthy or not to preserve everything was also discussed at the symposium. Overall, all of the speakers agreed that we do not have the proper tools or policies in place to be able to. And also that it is important to preserve more ephemeral data now in order to understand its significance in the future.  

According to Cloonan, “preservation must be a way of seeing and thinking about the world, and it must be a set of actions…[it] also has broader social dimensions, and any discussion of preservation must be include consideration of its cultural aspects” (232). Like Cloonan, Rumsey said that the primary issues of digital technology preservation are not just technical but are in light of larger political, economic, and education issues of our world. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook and libraries as well as government agencies need to put more effort into creating preservation programs. They also do not have the right capacity or policies of dealing with the ramifications of digital remains. If Verizon Media, the owner of Tumblr, were to step up and protect Elewa’s words from being misquoted as Kahlo’s, would it have stopped the proliferation of companies and individuals attributing the quote to Kahlo?

At the end of the discussion, Rumsey left us with a parting message–it is important for us to remember that there are people behind these machines or technologies. People program and create software and applications so that machines behave in a particular way, so it is only up to us to change how we use and think of digital technology. Technologies have no built in moral bias other than what we program them to be, but it is has become an expansion of who we are. The material and digital world are a connected space now. Therefore, we must take responsibility over our digitized selves.

References

Cloonan, Michele Valerie. “W(H)ITHER Preservation?” The Library Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2001, pp. 231-242. The University of Chicago Press, www.jstor.org/stable/4309597

Elewa, Oroma. “Elewa’s quote.” Instagram, 18 Mar. 2019,

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvG_v1YDnGT/.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” The American Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 3, 2003, pp. 735-762. Oxford University Press, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/52956

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Event Attendance: Designing the Connected City @ Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

By: Michelle Kung
INFO 601-02 Assignment 3 Event Attendance

Cities like New York are notorious for congestion and pollution. It often takes the same amount of time to walk somewhere as it does to drive somewhere. But big tech companies are reimagining urban mobility with connected and autonomous vehicles (AVs). On the 25th of February, 2019, leaders in the field of autonomous vehicles or driverless cars came together at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for a panel discussion. Moderated by Cynthia E Smith, the curator of Socially Responsible Design, the panel consisted of Sarah Williams, the director of Civic Data Design Lab at MIT, Ryan Powell, the head of user research and UX design at Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project), and Jack Robbins, the director of urban design at FXCollaborative. With diverse backgrounds, the three panellists debated topical issues engendered by AVs.

A World Unknown

One thing that the three panellists agreed on was that no one really knows how technology will impact mobility in urban spaces. The field is still new and concepts have only been tested on limited scales. Jack Robbins called this ‘a new era of mobility’. Indeed, we have no idea how the way we move, not just within cities but across the country, is going to change. All we know, and all leaders in the field know, is that autonomous vehicles will be the biggest drivers of change.

Heaven or Hell Scenario

Jack Robbins illustrated two opposing scenarios: a heaven scenario and a hell scenario. In the heaven scenario, after autonomous vehicles have replaced standard vehicles. There will be fewer vehicles on the road, fewer vehicle miles travelled and more spaces freed up in cities for other things. Without the need for parking (i.e. temporary storage of private vehicles) within the city, there is a tremendous opportunity for the creation of more green spaces and open spaces which will increase the liveability of any congested and densely populated city. On the other hand, in the hell scenario, there will be more vehicles and more vehicle miles travelled. Autonomous vehicles will be on the road driving around with or without passengers, which would be terrible for inhabitants of cities as well as the health of the planet. 

Will companies deliver on their promises?

Companies developing autonomous vehicles are of course promising everything detailed in the heaven scenario. But Jack Robbins cautioned event goers against trusting these companies too much.  After all, the way they make their money is incompatible with the promises they are making. For example, Google sells advertising but is promising increased road safety, mobility equity, easy parking, transit support, and less traffic. But how? By gathering an increasing variety of information on humans and on built environments.

Human Behaviour is Information as Thing

Waymo, Google’s driverless car company, purports to take a human centred approach to create a ride hailing service. Their primary goal is physical safety. In order to achieve this, Waymo collects an incredible amount of data on people and human behaviour in order to program the world’s most experienced drivers. According to Ryan Powell, 94% of road accidents are caused by human errors and Waymo’s aim is to eliminate this altogether. Waymo has managed to collect the data of behaviour patterns of adults, children, and cyclists in order to teach their fleet of driverless cars how to react safely in each scenario.

On the surface, treating human behaviour as information as thing is not at all revolutionary. Psychology, anthropology, and a whole host of other social sciences have studied the behaviour of humans for decades. But the monetisation and capitalisation of this information on such a large scale is new. Speakers in this talk were more interested in talking about the information regarding the space and infrastructure of a city than information about the people living in them, which is slightly alarming.

Public Space as Private information

A huge topic of debate in this design talk was the importance of the public nature of public space. Speakers Sarah Williams and Jack Robbins both challenged Ryan Powell on Waymo’s current practices of keeping information about the public space private.

As Waymo gathers more and more information on public spaces, their data set becomes more valuable. Sarah Williams advocated for city governments to leverage their power to ban companies like Waymo from operating in their cities to negotiate data rights. Both Sarah Williams and Jack Robbins argued for the importance of public governing bodies to step up and play a more active role in this sphere rather than passively hoping for technology companies to do the right thing by citizens. Autonomous vehicles pose real dangers in deepening and widening the digital divide, privatising public data, and decreasing equitability in cities. It is up to cities to set boundaries, guidelines, and regulations so that data collection and ownership of cities contribute to the public good and can benefit the many rather than the few.

Conclusion and Reflection

This design talk was fascinating and helped me conceptualise the new forms of information this emergent technology creates. The panel discussion really encouraged me to think more deeply about the data rights of citizens and city governments. It is already inconceivable, the amount of data big software companies have on our digital behaviour. It is entirely unimaginable, for the average user, what information companies developing autonomous vehicles will have on our behaviour in physical environments once AVs become more mainstream.

In the meantime, it is clear that city governments need to catch up to big tech players in order to ensure that public spaces are protected, new infrastructure built is adaptable to unforeseeable changes, that cities become more liveable in the long term for all its inhabitants, not just a select few.

References

Buckland, Michael K. “Information as Thing.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science42, no. 5 (1991): 351-60. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(199106)42:53.0.co;2-3.

Posted on by Michelle Kung 0