abstract

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF A URBAN SPACE SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF MEDIA?
CityMurmur tries to understand and visualize how media attention reshapes
the urban space and the city.


On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce - in real-time - different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself.
The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of the city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting


the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.
CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams not as passive representation of realities but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narration, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.
CityMurmur is an on-going project that will be performed in several cities. The first one is Madrid thank to the possibility given by Visualizar'08 workshop and OpenStreetMap for the valid data.
rumour-murmur

Dozens of tools and crawlers can now absorb this vast amount of data and represent it again through maps of various shapes and colours so that a 'rumour' or a 'fad' becomes almost as precisely described as a 'piece of news', 'information', or even a 'scientific fact'.
Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces.

Bruno Latour

Column for Times Higher Education Supplement
6th of April 2007
 
 

 

Writing Academic English
Since 2000 Writing Academic English (W.A.E.) is interested in developing tools for complex systems representation and to intevene in it:several design and consulting activities have been carried out. It is also involved into teaching and tutoring activities within the didactic framework of the INDACO Dpt. of the Politecnico di Milano.


CityMurmur continue the didactical, professional and research activities of the group. The commitment in developping new interfaces for the visualization of qualitative data for the communication of urban spaces is a core theme of the group. The city as a continuosly changing envinronment, particulally Madrid, emerged as field of study of particular interest.

W.A.E. is composed of:

Giorgio Caviglia

Giorgio Caviglia is taking his Master Degree in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano.
Since 2007 he is working as designer and website developer at whiterabbitwaslost.com. He's also currently working as Interaction Designer at Quantum SpA in Milan and as assistant professor in the fifth year of the Communication Design course at Politecnico di Milano.

www.ovrflw.com
e-mail

Marco Quaggiotto

Marco Quaggiotto is a researcher and teacher in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano.
His PhD and postdoctoral research concerns with the representation of knowledge and the complex dynamics of digital information. The aim of his research is to extend the cartographic metaphor beyond visual analogy, and to expose maps as a narrative model and tool to intervene in complex, heterogeneous, dynamic realities. He developed ATLAS, an interface prototype for the exploration of research resources, that allows users to manage bio-bibliographic resources in a shared environment and access them through different maps and representations.

www.knowledgecartography.org
e-mail

Donato Ricci

Donato Ricci, took his degree in Communication Design with a thesis about the relationship between product design and brand activities. From 2003 to 2005 he worked as communication designer for RadarTrend, a Milan cool-hunting agency interested in discover new way of living and consumer trends.
He worked for several years as design consultant for McCann Erickson client as Vodafone, Unilever and Martini. Since 2002 he started his own design agency, OfficeMilano, where he is in charge to manage the brand and ... activities. He his, also, Ph.D. Student and his research activities concern the relation between design communication artifacts, diagrams and maps, and decision making process.

www.densitydesign.org
www.officemilano.com
e-mail

Gaia Scagnetti

Gaia Scagnetti after her degree in communication design and a five year experience working both in advertising both as free lance decided to take a Phd in Industrial design and multimedia communication at the Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on the application of Complexity science to the practice of design in the context of social integration processes.
She is now involved in design research working on different themes: social integration in complex systems, complexity science and design, use of diagram and conceptual maps as operational tools for design in complex systems, complexity science influence on the research paradigm. At present she is lecturer and assistant professor in the fifth year of the Communication Design course at the Politecnico di Milano.

www.densitydesign.org
e-mail

During the Visualizar'08 Workshop joined the project
as collaborators:

Michele Graffieti

Michele Graffieti is attending his final year of the Master Degree in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano.
His freelance studio Graphieti Design is running since 1984, the year when he was born, but it took him a... little while to set it up (about 17 years). After this time, he has never stopped his activity, producing graphics, illustrations, websites, set designs for theatre, videos and bylaws (as a councilman in his local council).
Since 2002 he's acting in a theatre company for which he's also designing the brand identity and the communication system.
It's been a year now he's working as designer and website developer at whiterabbitwaslost.com; in the last 6 months he worked for 6 months for the italian newspaper Corriere della Sera as web-designer and multimedia infographics artist.

www.graphieti.com
e-mail

Samuel Granados Lopez

Samuel Granados is a PhD student at the Universidad de Málaga (Spain) and has a Master Degree in Journalism by this university.
In 2008 has obtained the degree of Master of Science in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) with the thesis Infographics as a tool for social communication. Nowadays collaborates like a multimedia infographics artist for the spanish newspaper El Mundo and researchs for his doctoral thesis about semiotics and visual journalism.
Consultant and teacher in communication design in diferent public and private institutions in Spain and Italy from 2001.

e-mail

Daniele Guido

Daniele Guido achieved an academic degree in Visual Communication at Brera Fine Art Academy in Milan. Now he's taking a Master Degree in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano.
He is currently involved as collaborator with Mur s.r.l in a ITC - CNR (National Research Council) project on OpenStreetMap mapping on Java-based mobile phones, and he's project owner of an open source application Google Android on the same theme.

e-mail