- A map for every day
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Eighteen months ago I wrote about redesigning my site’s front page and mentioned in passing that I’d also created a page for every day which aggregated many things:
I’ve created a page for every single day that pulls together the day’s bits and pieces. It doesn’t aggregate everything I’ve done — yet — but it’s worth it for me just to have a daily archive of my Twitters. Most dates on the site link to the relevant page; here’s an example of one.
I’ve now taken this a step further and added a map for every day which aggregates various pieces of location-based information about me. Here’s an example of that.
Here’s a screenshot for posterity:
I realised that I was generating a few bits of location data every day and so, without actively doing anything more, I could keep a rough track of where I’d been. There are three main sources of data, all of which are aggregated on the same maps:
Located tweets. If I tweet from my iPhone, and I’m out and about, I’ll usually have it send the current location. So, seeing as I already grab all my tweets to display in the sidebars of date-based pages on this site, it was easy enough to also grab the latitude and longitude, where present.
Foursquare check-ins. I’ve been using Foursquare for a while, without being entirely sure why. It rarely, if ever, results in serendipitously meeting friends. But I liked the graphs it generates which made me think the data might be useful someday. A while back I started having it send check-ins as tweets to a private Twitter account that I’m using for such automated things. (Thanks to Russell for that idea.) So now I’m grabbing and archiving this Twitter feed and using the Foursquare tweets for map locations.
Flickr photos. Whether I take a photo with my iPhone and use its location, or manually position a photo on the map after uploading to Flickr, all those photos make for a lot of location data. So they’re on the maps too.
All of which means that for most recent days there are one or more points that show where I’ve been. Here are some examples, showing good and problematic things:
14 March 2010, while I was in Austin, TX, for SXSW. A mixture of photos and located tweets, also showing how useless the iPhone’s positioning can be: point 4 should have been from the convention centre, rather than a park I’ve never been to. In case you can’t guess, the numbers indicate the order in which the events occurred.
15 March 2010, from the same trip. Point 5 (and 9) aggregates several tweets that were at the same location — at the moment I assume consecutive tweets/check-ins/photos within 0.00025 of a degree in both directions are the same point. This page also shows some confusion over days and time zones: Points 1 and 2 were actually the previous day in Texas. I’ve tried to ignore time zone differences from all these sources in the hope of preserving my sanity.
18 March 2010. After Austin I went to New York and, although I didn’t record and transmit any location information while there (data roaming charges being expensive, and wi-fi more scarce), the photos I took and subsequently positioned in Flickr provide a nice map of some of the places I went that day. Similarly for days like this in Morocco in May, although some of those positions were guesses a few weeks later.
7 August 2010. A Saturday in London, combining Foursquare check-ins and tweets. Point 4 aggregates a Foursquare check-in and a tweet that were from the same location but had very slightly different lat/long data. The rest of the page features plenty of other stuff I did online that day.
24 August 2010. When most of my London-based weekdays look pretty much the same, a few dots around Shoreditch, a map view makes unusual days stand out. This one shows me going to a few places (as a non-located tweet says in the sidebar, “a pleasant afternoon of flaneuring”) before popping to Heathrow Airport later. That’ll be nice to see and remember in the future.
This idea isn’t to highlight content that’s fascinating to other people — these date pages aren’t even particularly obvious on the site — but are a manifestation of aggregating whatever data I can about myself. Save it now as you don’t know what or when it will be interesting. Given that so many of us are constantly leaving footprints across so many loosely-joined online places I can’t help feeling it should be easier for people to (a) archive and save such data and (b) view it all in one place.
One further thought… I was surprised that although much of this data is available online already — my located tweets and photos are public, although my Foursquare check-ins are only visible to friends on the service — putting it all on daily maps made me feel uneasy. It suddenly felt much more transparent and “stalkerish.” Seeing a single point on a map, for a tweet or a photo, is one thing. Looking through my history and seeing where I’ve been regularly, and recently, feels odd.
As a result of this the site currently doesn’t show maps for the past week. This isn’t a huge change, and it’s not even particularly logical, but it does feel slightly better. As Tom put it, this emphasises the archival nature of the concept, rather than the “where am I right now?” idea. I’ll see how it goes.
Which is a demonstration of why privacy is such a really, really difficult thing to deal with. If I can’t even work out for myself when I’m invading my own privacy, deciding on policies for thousands or millions of very different people using a service is a big problem.
Anyway, there we go: a map for every day.
In Misc on 2 September 2010. 2 comments. Permalink
- Week 375
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I managed to have most of a day off this week, really off, away from the computer off. That was nice.
Three other days or so were spent doing Twitter-related non-work. I updated the code that posts @samuelpepys to use OAuth (the new method of proving you are who you say you are when something posts to Twitter) which was reasonably simple.
Then I updated the code which re-publishes all my tweets on gyford.com (eg, Wednesday’s), which lead on to a couple of days of fiddling with a new, related feature which I’ll probably make live next week once I’ve decided whether compromising my own privacy in such a fashion is really wise.
Today has, as usual, been spent updating Pepys and fixing a few score more broken comments on the site.
This week Russell and Leila both wrote about BRIG, our office, which is also nice.
- It’s not me, it’s you
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Anyone who follows me on Twitter may have noticed my occasional outbursts of frustration about BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. You may have asked, “Why don’t you switch it off, or listen to something else?” I didn’t, because I wanted to believe Today could be good, that it could live up to its reputation as the premier agenda-setting news programme. But from today, I’ve given up, it’s over, we’re finished, no more. Today, it’s not me, it’s you.
Which is a shame. As I said, I want Today to be good. I want it to be in-depth and have an interesting agenda. I want it to be the radio equivalent of, say, the very best of broadsheet newspapers (not the highest bar in the world, but you’d think it might be possible). Instead, it all too often ends up as the radio equivalent of mid-market tabloids, leaving me with the same queasy, angry feeling I have if I glance through the Express or a shrieking local paper.
It’s not even like I listen to a lot of Today. I only ever hear a few minutes each morning, before I get up or while making breakfast. But that’s always more than enough. This morning for example, after dozing through ‘Thought for the Day’ (don’t get me started) I heard some treasury minister doing nothing but avoiding answering a straight question. So, fair dues, this isn’t directly Today’s fault but it’s so common, this non-interview with politicians, that there seems little point bothering. But the programme is so pleased to have interviewed a politician that the minister’s non-answer is the bit that is used, out-of-context, as a quote in a news story a few minutes later, making him sound quite reasonable, rather than the evasive, weaselly little shit he seemed at the time.
A little later Today covered the cat thrown in a bin story. They’re far from alone in this — it’s everywhere today — but I’d hope for some intelligence from a quality news programme. They started with a report from Rory Cellan Jones on the reaction to the video online, which is potentially the only interesting part of the story — how something like this goes viral, the over-reaction from people, the posting of her address, the police protection… it could be tied in to many previous internet witch hunts, like 4chan’s hounding of Jessi Slaughter. Instead Jones’s report was little more than detailing the numbers of people who’d watched the YouTube video or Liked the Facebook page. The rest of the report was an interview with reknowned animal-rights-fanatic, author Jilly Cooper. Can you guess what she thought about a cat being dumped in a bin? Yawn. This doesn’t illuminate or inform the story at all. “Obsessive animal rights author outraged by cruelty to cat” is not news.
This morning’s show didn’t even feature the whining, faux-dumb, overly antagonistic and superior presence of John Humphrys who manages to make the daily escapade unbearable.
But the show’s not all bad. Humphrys aside, the presenters aren’t, generally, annoying or dumb. I could listen to Evan Davis for hours, especially talking about the economy, something he manages to do both in-depth and with clarity. There are some good reports, but these get over-shadowed by all the dumbness that stands out, and the frustrating choice of other stories. Too often Today is an attention-grabbing, overly-brief, politician-pandering, technophobic embarrassment.
Which is such a shame. It’s supposed to be the UK’s premier radio news show. What’s worse, this is probably still true. As far as I know, there are no other decent, quality news options, particularly on analogue broadcast radio. (I’ve been told the World Service is worth a listen at that time of the morning, but I don’t have a radio that picks it up.) I don’t even know if there’s an alternative UK-based radio news programme I could listen to by any means that would be decent, digital or online. Is there? Surely, in this age of fragmented, multi-channel, distributed, bottom-up media someone in the UK is making something that reports the news with consistent intelligence?
I know a lot of people who listen to Today. But I know the same number of people who are always moaning about how awful it is. Which makes me think there must be a market, somehow, for a better thing. I don’t know what it is but I hope it’s out there somewhere.
In Misc on 25 August 2010. 9 comments. Permalink
- ‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag
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Published in 1973, On Photography (Amazon UK and US) is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag, most/all of which appeared in the New York Review of Books. When I started college in 1990, roughly half the age of the book ago, we were assigned the first chapter to read. As I’ve been thinking about photography a little over the past few months I thought it was time I read the whole thing. It’s all good, but that first chapter, which you might be able to cough find online, was the most interesting to me. I think this book, or something like it, is well worth a read if you feel your photography habit is caught up in the purely technical, buying bits of kit, angle. Here are the bits from the whole book that jumped out at me while reading…
In Plato’s Cave
3
In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.
6-7
In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity — and ubiquity — of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. … There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
8
…like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
9
It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had. Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbours.
10
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
13
Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate — all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.
14
The old-fashioned camera was clumsier and harder to reload than a brown Bess musket. The modern camera is trying to be a ray gun.
15
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
17-18 “A photograph … cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.” Photos of Vietnam had an effect in America, but only because there was already an anti-war sentiment. Journalists felt supported in their efforts. But there was little similar feeling around the Korean War, so there weren’t the same kinds of photos published.
19-21 We become inured to terrible events because we become over-familiar with them through photographs. “In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.”
21
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalised pathos of time past. … Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
23
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. … Of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past. …[but] understanding is based on how [something] functions [not merely how it looks]. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
30-31 Walker Evans took photographs of down-to-earth subjects, eg subway riders, sharecroppers, both Victorian houses in Boston and stores in Alabama.
Evans wanted his photographs to be “literate, authoritative, transcendent.” The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.
40-41
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals — that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not.
42
The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed.
Melancholy Objects
52
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.
59
Some photographers set up as scientists, others as moralists. The scientists make an inventory of the world; the moralists concentrate on hard cases.
59-62 August Sander began a photographic catalogue of the German people in 1911. The photographs “imply a pseudo-scientific neutrality.” The Farm Securities Administration project, in America, from 1935, “was concerned exclusively with ‘low-income groups.’” It was
unabashedly propagandistic … to demonstrate the value of the people photographed. Thereby, it implicitly defined its point of view: that of middle-class people who needed to be convinced that the poor were really poor, and that the poor were dignified. … Though the poor do not lack dignity in Sander’s photographs, it is not because of any compassionate intentions. They have dignity by juxtaposition, because they are looked at in the same cool way as everybody else.
62 A footnote: In 1942, Roy Emerson Stryker sent a memo to his staff:
We must have at once pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everybody is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.
The Heroism of Vision
86 The first technique for retouching negatives was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, the before and after portrait astounding the crowds. “The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular.”
98 Bauhaus designers were dazzled by industrial and scientific photography, but this approach has not prevailed.
In the main tradition of the beautiful in photography, beauty requires the imprint of a human decision: that this would make a good photograph, and that the good picture would make some comment.
99-100 Avant-garde close-up and abstract photography of the 1920s and 1930s “have become clichés of a merely photographic way of seeing.” It used to take an intelligent and literary eye to interpret them, but now they’re understandable by anyone.
103
It is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naïve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs. This democratising of formal standards is the logical counterpart to photography’s democratising of the notion of beauty. …beauty has been revealed by photographs as existing everywhere.
105-6
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith’s Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.
…
Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning, can reveal truth. But partly because the photograph is, always, an object in a context, this meaning is bound to drain away.
108-9
The caption … is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. … It cannot prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support from being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries…
111 Photography discloses “the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things.”
The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time — the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph — has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty. Buy the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth. The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers — displacing formalist justifications of their quest for beauty — is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic enterprise.
Photographic Evangels
116 How much does someone need to know and understand their subject in order to get a good photograph?
Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence, or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter.
116-7
But even when ambitious professionals disparage thinking — suspicion of the intellect being a recurrent theme in photographic apologetics — they usually want to assert how rigorous this permissive visualising needs to be. “A photograph is not an accident — it is a concept,” Ansel Adams insists. “The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography — by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good — is fatal to serious results.” To take a good photograph, runs the common claim, one must already see it. … But, despite their reluctance to say so, most photographers have always had — with good reason — an almost superstitious confidence in the lucky accident.
118
What is exciting “are photographs that say something in a new manner,” Harry Callaghan writes, “not for the sake of being different, but because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.”
122-3
As photographers describe it, picture-taking is both a limitless technique for appropriating the objective world and an unavoidably solipsistic expression of the singular self.
Either way, the photographer is seen as “a kind of ideal observer,” a stance which “implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act,” something photographers usually feel obliged to do. Ansel Adams urges that we say we “make” a picture, not “take” one.
133 Unlike with paintings and painters, we expect the creator of a photograph to be a “discreet presence.”
The very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer’s work from another’s… These photographs have their power as images (or copies) of the world, not of an individual artist’s consciousness.
In Books on 23 August 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Week 374
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The past couple of weeks, with no client work on, have been taken up with Pepys. I decided to update the maps on the site and improve some of the location data. I thought this might be two, maybe three, days’ work. Two weeks later I’m still going.
First, I unified and updated the two different bits of mapping code on the site to use the latest Google Maps API. Not too tricky, and nice to be up-to-date. Then on to improving the data…
Whenever Pepys mentions a street, tavern, church, city, etc, it gets added to the Encyclopedia and, if I can find its location, it’s positioned on a map. I wanted to improve the location data for streets and larger areas so that their length or shape could be shown, rather than have them represented by single points.
This process has taken several days so far, and you can see the work-in-progress for streets and areas of London. You can see the shapes, rather than just pins.
On the one hand this is a fascinating task, looking through old maps and working out exactly where old locations are today. Much of the City’s layout is still the same while further afield, and south of the Thames, it’s hard to compare old and new maps, so much has changed.
On the other hand it’s a laborious, repetitive and time-consuming task and I can’t believe I’m still working my way through it two weeks later. This is the un-glamorous, data-creation end of the glitzy, showbiz world of online mapping.
Still, it’ll be nice when it’s finished. I’ll need to do some re-categorisation and change the interface and graphics on those Pepys maps pages, but that’ll be the fun bit.
Other than all that… the two Fridays were spent updating Pepys’ diary entries and plodding through fixing all those character-encoding-broken comments I mentioned before (another 200+ fixed). Plus a morning or so spent preparing my and the company’s finances for my accountant, in much the way I understand people clean up before their cleaner arrives.
Next week I hope to spend some more time doing fun and satisfying things.
- Wired Index
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Wired UK magazine has started an advertising thing called The Wired Index, showing “fascinating new facts” on billboards around the country throughout August. Here’s one of the new Wired Index video ads:
This campaign reminds me of this one by the old Wired UK around 1996/7, under the title “What you need to know about the digital revolution”:
These facts, and others, shown here on postcards, were also used on advertising posters on underground trains, and possibly elsewhere.
Which isn’t meant to be an unhelpfully bitter and snarky “Ha, this was done fifteen years ago, you’re so lame!” kind of thing. Just an observation that facts and figures seem to be consistently thought of as the way to amaze and attract the general public to Wired. I’m not sure that’s right. I’m not sure I want it to be right — single stats like this seem a bit dry, and not as amazing and transformative as one initially thinks they might be. I guess they’re cheap though. Still, it’s interesting to see.
If, fifteen years ago, we’d tried to imagine what facts would be used for such a campaign in 2010, I wonder if anyone would have guessed remotely right. Either the subjects or the quantities. Could we guess now what figures would be featured in a campaign in 2025?
In Misc on 13 August 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Week 372
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A bit of a gap there but the three past weeks have been pretty much the same work-wise, so let’s collapse them into some kind of folded temporal zig-zag of time and treat them as one.
The majority of my days recently have been spent working on a project for the new client, which remains under wraps for the moment. It’s been lots of JavaScript, talking to an API, swearing at Internet Explorer, that kind of thing. Aside from the swearing, it’s been a good process; the client is completely up for a kind of design-as-development (or should that be development-as-design), in which the exploration of the data and interface, its design and the programming, are all happening concurrently. There have been no wireframes, no Photoshop mock-ups, just a continual process of poking and pushing and building and polishing towards what it could be. “It” will be shown to some potential users shortly for their comments, after which there will be more to do.
I’ve been able to spend Fridays on Pepys recently and, as well as the 3-4 hours spent on updating the diary (he’s rather verbose recently), I’ve been ploughing on with an equally onerous task. A database move a few years ago left many of the comments posted on the site truncated, and I’m now manually fixing them, thanks to archive.org’s copy. But with probably 2,000 broken comments, it’s taking a while.