madrid-melbourne.org

Medialab-Prado has issued a call for collaborators in the projects selected for Visualizar08: Database Cities, directed by José Luis de Vicente. The following is loosely quoted from the call:

The role of the collaborator is crucial in the Medialab-Prado workshops’ statement and development process, as the workshops are constituted as a horizontal collaborative work environment, knowledge interchange and theoretical-practical training among teachers, authors and collaborators.

You are invited to discuss the projects in the forums, and of course I will be glad to comment on Density Happens with anyone interested in collaborating. Preferred collaborators would fit one of the two following profiles:

Collaborator profile 1:

• has good grasp of maths
• is programming language agnostic
• feels at ease with declarative, functional and constraint-based programming styles, even in imperative languages
• is someone who will enjoy reading, implementing and extending these papers about cartograms.

Collaborator profile 2:

• has some experience with website scraping and data-munging, and/or…
• has some knowledge of Geographical Information Systems, especially map formats
• would enjoy extracting comma-separated files from this series of webpages.
• would enjoy merging the above into data extracted from this excess of Excel spreasheets.

Any question you have, please ask away, either here or at the Medialab-Prado Forum.

And please bear with me if I am still a bit vague: I am reading the relevant papers as fast as I can download them.

The list of projects selected for Visualizar08 has just been published, and I have also received an email telling me Density Happens has been selected. Thus I will be at the Medialab-Prado workspace in Madrid from November 3rd through the 19th. Thanks to the selection committee for their support and encouragement, and congratulations to the rest of the participants.

Madrid-Melbourne and one effect of urban density: it's night in Madrid, and there's people about; it's day in Melbourne, but there's not a soul in the street.

I have already filled in the characteristics of the Density Happens project at the Medialab-Prado forums, including the profile of preferred collaborators. As I have decided to focus the work of Density Happens on cartogram projection, I have gone for a very technical profile. Hopefully some of the would-be collaborators have a background in Computer Science with reasonable maths skills. If you fit the bill, and can be in Madrid during the first half of November, here’s where to apply for collaboration in Density Happens as a Visualizar08 project.

Though dangerously close to the deadline, I have managed to hand in my proposal for Visualizar08 at the last possible moment (hint: my euphemism for having a deadline has become “moving to Hawaii”). It is called Density Happens, and the idea behind it is to employ urban density as the X axis for visualising all kind of measurements related to urban quality of living.

Density exhibit at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Photo by Ben Cerveny

Other projects have focused on density before, but I hope this one is the first that examines how everything else, from abortion rate to sales of icecream, from pollution to food prices, from teenage drunkenness to subjective measurements of happiness, can be related to urban density and its immediate effects.