Submission 02 Documentation

Update on The Research Matrix

Still 01 - Synopsis of Methodology

Still 02 - Experiment 01: Information (Collective) - Click (HERE) to be forwarded to the full resolution version stored in Deviantart. 

Still  03 - Experiment 02: Information (Negotiated/Discursive) - Click (HERE) to be forwarded to the full resolution version stored in Deviantart. 

Experiment 02 - Information(Negotiated/Discursive).

Check out below video and stills for the main results of my experiment (in response to the questions raised in my previous post) concerning aggregated read-write representation of places as seen through social media. Main documentation of these images and experiments will be presented in the next post.

Brief Overview: - This experiment explores the virtual representation of geographic places by feeding a mash-up of Social Media API feeds into a Geographic Information System via Yahoo Pipes. Density maps are created based on the rating that each entry (point) received from its peers. This experiment led to the identification of "Viral Places";- features that are not physically/visibly centered but have achieved the same popularity in density in terms of its representation in social media environments.

Neo-Geography, Datascapes and 'The Public Sphere'

"How can we understand the city in times of globalisation and explosion of scale? Do we lose control in these quantities or can we file its components and manipulate them? Let us imagine a city that is only based upon data. A city, that wants to be described only by information. A city, that doesn't know any topography, no context, purely huge, only data..."

'Metacity/Datatown', MVRDV, 1999 (film).

The Personal - 'Mapping the Credit Crunch' - BBC Radio 4. Maptube Engine.

The Absurd - 'Global McDonalds Big Mac Prices, 2007' - Maptube Engine.

"Geography is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance and one that is becoming known as 'Neogeography'...a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of Neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and/or/ artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of 'real' geographic techniques."

Hudson.Smith et.al (2008). The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), London.

In the discussion of a public sphere, Alan Mckee (2006) debunks the Modernist notion of the term 'public sphere' as a singular, progressive, and consolidated representation of a common culture/interest among all people. Commonality, according to the modernist doctrine, is the glue holding the elements of the public sphere together. 

In reality, the fragmentation that have always existed in the public sphere are becoming more visible to each other; - beginning from the extension of voting rights to the rise of broadcast culture. What is once the homogeneous 'official public sphere' is now challenged by distinct interpretation of places based on personal and affiliated memory. If we discuss the issue of heritage in this light, we may ask what is important to people;- is it an iconic monumental building of 'cultural' significance, scribed by years of official documents and media as an object of historic relevance? Or is it a visually indistinct, un-noticeable, perhaps run-down building that is associated with an aggregate of intimate memories and experiences concerning the neighborhood in question?

Left: Place (official, iconic, civic, progressive) - Customs House Library, Circular Quay. 

Right: Place (fragmented, memonic, negotiated) - Former Community Language School, Auburn.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of information we now consume digitally is user created, and the distinction between the professional and the amateur in broadcast culture is increasingly blurred thanks to the availability of content making and airing tools/techniques at little or no cost. Broadcasting has been transformed from a read-only to a read-write culture. What kind of representation of geography can we draw in light of this, keeping in mind on one hand the rise of user generated information and on the other the imperative to account for an indeterminate, fragmented, and negotiated nature of a 'public sphere.'

How can collective information contribute to a "bottom-up" approach in identifying a site/brief?

Preamble:

Formerly, an approach to the design process involved having both the program and site as predetermined criteria. We are given a site to work on and the function that it is to be, and if we weren't given those we tell ourselves firstly that we want to build an X on a place Y. We then examine everything that place Y has on offer for a building X, or anything surprising that building X can offer to Y. Either case, we have made the prejudgment that building X is the best thing that could go on place Y or vice versa. We practice as a god-mode architect who says that "i want to build this building that would fit onto this site, believe me it would." 

What if we leave either the site or the program as indeterminate factors? What if we know what we want to build, but lets leave the site out to the jury, especially if we are looking at a large scale building X that would have a significant impact to site Y. Rather than holding copious amounts of "community interaction sessions" with a few places the designers have in mind, what if we can tap into the vast and varying quantities of related information on the internet and translate those into a brief or identify a site?

Introduction:

“Web environments can be pictured as data bases that can be provided as a central service or can be built from the bottom up in decentralised fashion. To an extent this reflects our division between designers and users with central systems having designers in distinctly different roles from users.”

“The extent to which users and/or designers can create derivative products from the data no matter how it is created is part of the functionality of the system. This can range from entirely preconceived ways of manipulating the data in the search for patterns or networks to loose sets of rules that users and designers can invoke in creating searches for new kinds of patterns that are not predetermined.”

Hudson-Smith Et.al. Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web2.0 through Crowdsourcing. UCL Working Paper Series 143 (8). London: CASA

This experiment follows on from the initial project proposal of an live/work/play office precinct situated at Civic Place, Parramatta. The experiment would test the proposal of Parramatta as the best suited place for commerce oriented redevelopment by combining current market data related to "commerce oriented development." Three sets of information, (the employment market conditions, the commercial real estate market conditions, and the housing real estate conditions) have been scrutinized in order to arrive at a place for commercial oriented development at the LGA scale. In preference to real-time and flexible information, the experiment shyed away from "official data" arrived by sources such as census data or RPData as they tended to be skewed, outdated, or generalised.

  

Assumptions/Challenges:

High expectations of the data turning in favor of Parramatta LGA was anticipated as it is heavily backed by current metropolitan strategies as a key performance area for commercial redevelopment. It was also expected that market data would be easily obtainable in legible forms, that is, the data would immediately present us with a title, a figure of density and a time factor. These data were assumed to be obtainable in RSS format.

The outcome was that a significant portion of these data were skewed to highlight some areas, for example, premium listings where sellers paid extra to duplicate their advertisement were evident in expensive areas such as Sydney and North Sydney. To maintain the information asymmetry between buyers and real estate agents, many of the data were not available on RSS feeds, and the methodology was amended in order to strip out website data and reconvert them into useful RSS feeds.

Methodology:

Website information from various employment and real estate agencies were fed into Yahoo Pipes. A technique known as "mashup" was used to unpack and recombine the data into relevant formats, namely the location the intensity and a brief textual or pictorial description. These were then converted into RSS feeds which were able to be cut and organised into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was then translated into ArcGIS for analysis. 

An examination into the general descriptive content of each LGA area when converted into RSS was done to determine the specific market climate for each area. For example, whether the area was compact and centralising where the advertisements showed an abundance of new, compact properties or whether the area was dispersed, decentralised where the advertisement showed an abundance of detached homes, old warehouses, etc.

Results:

The data was recombined and evaluated. Parramatta LGA was third as the most suited place to build an office complex. After Sydney City, the experiment identified Blacktown as a more suitable candidate for an office complex based on economic criteria. The experiment was affected by the quality of the data by the way that the broadcasters tended to hide information on pricing and size (residential), and also by the way that the data is deliberately skewed to make certain items more prominent than others.