kyle /socailcosttracker

DANM 250B: Participatory Culture/ CMPS 290T: Technologies for Social Change

Research Proposals:

What I've learned this quarter in Social Cost Tracking is scattered across a variety of false starts and frustrations. These include the following:

• GPS/Photo Essays Data Collection/ Data Visualization based on Glimpse iPhone app, which takes photographs at set intervals and cross-references those with GPS data, my work this quarter will include research into locative media strategies for conveying meaning about products, seeking applicable data sets and constructing useful visualizations of such data.

Questions

• is GPS data about product streams being collected by someone (other than the company that makes the product?)?
• Is there a way to gather the geo-data about products without individually following it? (ie "where has George been?", putting radio transponders in the product (like you might endangered trout or hawks)?
• Google Maps? is the baseline for visualizing geo-data; what can we do that's better suited for the story that we want to tell?

• A series of interviews with workers (mainly service workers) about the failures of consumers to understand fundamental truths about their jobs.

• Attempt to model potential Mechanical Turk tasks. Specifically, what sorts of "media rich" data about products can be easily accessed, on, say, You Tube?

examples:

Video documenting a Palestinian Solidarity group's boycott of Trader Joe's (b/c they sell many products that originate in Isreal).

Campaign by Cal Nurses (Health Care Union) against Crystal Geyser Spring Water. Note the contrast behind relatively high production quality and total incoherence of message. What are these people angry about? I'm still confused.

Campaign against Coca-Cola's anti-union violence in Columbia.

Document's Dow Chemicals/ Union Carbide's mishandling of Bhopal disaster.

Ideas for further research:

• Essay about our experiences in this course attempting to collaborate across disciplines. To become the basis of a discussion forum on HASTAC (Humanities Arts Sciences Technologies Advanced Collaborative).

Questions:

1. what have arts students learned about Arts research from collaboration with CS students? About science research?
2. what have CS students learned about science research from collaboration with DANM students? About arts research?
3. what are the failures of this type of research? What are the strengths?