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[C-print 13x40 inches, re-scaled representation 1:8]

[C-print 13x40 inches, re-scaled representation 1:8]

Hi, let me contribute a preliminary link about patterns emerging from mobile messages on interactive maps and how they effect urban life. The text Away from Street Level was presented at the 2007 Locative Media conference in Siegen, Germany.

“Interactive urban maps can do more than just reveal where people or information are located. By expanding people’s awareness of the city from street level up to the bird’s-eye view and to even higher scales, maps are capable of changing the areas of urban life that are most affected by mobile communication technologies. This paper focuses on maps of spatial annotation systems (…). It illuminates how newly emerging spatio-temporal patterns of locative messages on maps introduce a new feedback between street level and higher levels of urban organization.

…

The city certainly qualifies as an emergent system (…). City life produces new patterns on higher organizational levels such as neighborhoods and communities without central control or planning (cf. Johnson 2001, 38). Through feedback loops, higher-level patterns in the city influence the interactions and communication on the lower levels from which they arose (Johnson 2001, 137; Townsend 2000).

If we agree that the city is an emergent self-organizing system and that locative information (mobile messages) is an integral part of the urban metabolism, we can assume that these messages themselves (…) will (re)produce emergent self-organizing patterns on the map, constituting higher levels of organization. How the user recognizes and identifies emerging dynamic patterns is a question of map-reading fluency, analogous to the recognition of composite map marks as suggested by Robinson and Petchenik (1976). ”

References from the excerpt:

Johnson, S. 2001. Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Scribner.

Townsend, A. 2000. Life in the real-time city: Mobile telephones and urban metabolism. Journal of Urban Technology 2 (7): 85-104, http://urban.blogs.com/research/JUT-LifeRealTime.pdf

Robinson, A. and B. Petchenik. 1976. The nature of maps: Essays towards understanding maps and mapping. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

The Emergence Project is a software art installation exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center’s digital facade gallery from October 11 until December 31, 2008. The piece investigates how complex patterns arise out of a series of simple interactions, without apparent direction or plan. Rising from the actual as-it’s-happening discourse emanating out of the Chicago Humanities Festival, the presentations, performances, and panel discussions are captured, analyzed, and processed into visualizations that dynamically evolve from minute to minute. The generative artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters, based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference.

In the work, hundreds of organic digital creatures embody contributions from panelists and the audience, captured by natural language processing software and the World Wide Web. The digital creatures, or idea clusters, continuously interact with each other, evaluating qualitative proximity in regards to their meaning and frequency. Thousands of local interactions between the creatures, as well as autonomous creation of new creatures, eventually generate patterns, that represent ‘big ideas’ emerging from the discussions throughout the festival. The piece continues to evolve over time, reflecting the evolution process in form of graphical patterns, statistics and maps.

Emergence has become one of the liveliest areas of research in philosophy and science. Examples of apparent emergent phenomena range from colonies of ants to the popularity of a particular hairstyle, and life itself. The Emergence Project interrogates the very concept of Emergence by reflexively adopting emergent behavior simulations to contemporary discourse on Emergence.

Somewhere in here is the solution that I seek.

Still having problems clearing the string of backslashes. php provides a function (I have just found out) that will fix this.

The current problem seems to be that backslash is not handled correctly by the choices we’ve made.  I am trying to replace all occurrences of the single character backslash with zip-nada-null. str_replace() might be better for this, and should be faster than preg_replace().

Something is screwy about the title, author, and source fields parsed from the blog header text that we added in the configuration for the suscribe2 plugin of wordpress.  There are protected quotes in the header that I believe snarf has not handled correctly so far.  For this test I have wired the blog code back together, but added a stripper for backslash to match the strippers already in place for quote and double quote that are at the beginning of the text processing block. Let us see.

The next preg_match is more complicated.  Assuming that it succeeds, I am setting the variables that it would otherwise set to known simple values.  It might be that the matches are toxic text that kills the database insertion call.  This should test that hypothesis.

Previous blog went into the database as default _email_ stream.  I have uncommented the initial test for blogness of the entry.  If this test is successful, the database will tag this entry as _blog_ but not processes it any differently than it would an _email_.

And it lands in the database as expected.  So, perhaps this actual blog entry works, I have found the main issues.