Gallery of Projects for Mixing and Remixing Information (Spring 2006)

TrafficMap 2.0

Members: Mark Bilandzic

Description

TrafficMap 2.0 is a web-application that displays current traffic warnings and incidents from throughout the US on a dynamic map. The user can either choose to type in a specific address in order to get traffic alerts on street level, or a city can be picked from the menu to get an overview of alerts for a larger area.
The traffic data is represented in form of pins that point to the exact location where the incident happened. Due to different pin colors, one can distinguish easiliy between high-severity and low-severity alerts. Once the user clicks on a pin, more detailed information such as the report-title, road-number or the end date show up.
As the user navigates on the map by zooming in/out or drag-n-drop, traffic alerts for the currently displayed area get reloaded on the fly.
Link: http://harbinger.sims.berkeley.edu/~markbil/

FlickrBrns

Members: Patrick Schmitz

Description

FlickrBrns is a service that automatically creates Ken Burns-style movie effects from photos on the Flickr service. The effects are based upon the notes feature of the Flickr system. Users choose a photo from among their Flickr photos that have notes, and then use a simple UI to set basic parameters like the pacing of animation and the order in which to present the notes. The resulting FlickrBrns 'movie' can be embedded in any web page.

Links

Leveraging community annotations for image adaptation to small presentation formats

FlickrBrns User start page

Examples
Note that these examples will only work in IE on Windoze

Pictures with Notes by Raymond Yee

Pictures with Notes by Patrick Schmitz

I Walk the Line

Members: Kelly Bryant

Description

Have you ever met someone and thought "this person is so familiar, where have I seen him before"? Imagine that you could look at a history of their life and your life to determine if you have ever been in the same place at the same time. This concept of visualizing the daily travel of people is the inspiration for I Walk the Line. I Walk the Line utitlizes the Google maps API to create an interface where a person can create a line drawing that represents their daily travel whether by foot, air, car or other mode. The blog of lines enables a person to detect patterns in one's daily life or determine if their lines intersect with the lines of others. For example: "During the week I seem to travel the same short path but on the weekends I go in the opposite direction." Or "Jimmy looks so familiar because our lines crossed at a party in Texas back in 2003."

Walk the Line! (Runs best in Mozilla Firefox) | Read More

Palmer High School Reunion

Members: Rich Meyer and Adrienne Hilgert

Description

Palmer High School Reunion is a website that offers a visual clearinghouse of information for the upcoming reunion event. This is a one-stop-shopping site: reunion participants can stay abreast of what daily activities are happening, classmates who will be attending, directions to events, and hotels nearby. It also has a map page that shows markers of the home city and zip where participants currently live.

The website also has a form that asks participants to register for the events they plan to attend, as well as a questionnaire form that asks participants to supply information about their current lives, families and past high school memories. The questionnaire form can be submitted immediately online, and the information is then pulled from a database for dynamically updating other web pages in the Palmer Reunion site, such as the 20th reunion directory.

PhotoArcs

Members: Lilia Manguy

Description

PhotoArcs is a web application that facilitates the online equivalent of co-present storytelling through photos. By using the metaphor of the arc used in narrative writing, PhotoArcs enables the user to create a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. PhotoArcs also serves as a means for storing the context of a photo with the photo, so it does not lose its meaning when the photo-taker is absent.

The PhotoArcs demo is a remix of the Flickr API, the drag-and-drop utility from the Yahoo! UI Library, and JavaScript from Frequecy Decoder's "Little Yellow Stickies". The interface was coded in PHP. It retrieves photos by contact name or tag from Flickr. The thumbnails are dragged and dropped onto targetable spaces on the arc. The user can then insert a narrative by creating a text box, placing it behind some photos, resizing it to describe any number to photos, and writing part of the story.

Links

Demo | Project Documentation

AlienYarn

Members: Scott Fisher

Description

AlienYarn remixes selected Flickr photos with creative story text in a separate database and interface. People are encouraged to submit photos or story text to create fictional, diverse and creative yarns.

Though AlienYarn has some similarities to other projects such as PhotoArcs, the emphasis is on visual or textual creativity and a game-like comparison of diverse work that people might come up with for a similar set of inputs. It allows comparison, contrasting and riffing on creative ideas.

The interface was created using PHP, mySQL with phpFlickr libraries. The current version is functional but basic. Future versions might include interactive Flickr photo searching, photo selection and ordering; contact and friend awareness for photo and yarn display; rating and feedback functions; searching, sorting and filtering; enhanced entry and display options.

Links

Demo | Project Report

Thinkr

Members: Carrie Burgener

Description

Currently
Given a series of images can you figure out what is Flickr Thinking? Thninkr is a game asking a user to guess what tag all of the photos in the series have in common. The game includes five levels, the user passes each level either when they run out of time, or when they guess the tag correctly.

Ph-lashr
Thinkr is a "Ph-lashr", meaning, was made using a PHP back-end that connects to the Flickr api using PhpFlickr, the PHP passes the necessary information to Flash, that handles all of the game logic and visual treatment.

The Future
Thinkr represents a work in progress piece. Originally the game was concived to be a multi-player live environment game that would engage people to interact with eachother using simple text messages. The technology for the final version will include a PHP service collecting text messages, that communicates with the game changing the input device from a laptop computer to a handheld device, and the competitor from the computer to the people around you in the environment.

Links

Final Presentation Slides: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cburg/sets/72057594120640767/

Final Write-up: https://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/twiki/pub/Infomixs06/FinalProjects/Thinkr.pdf

Working Demo: http://a.parsons.edu/~carrie/MixingRemixing/Experiments/version6

Flickr Neighbrhood

Members: Brad Herman and Gilbert Hernandez

Description

One of Flickr's greatest assests is the great number of photos posted to the network. In addition, the wide variety of photo subject and style help make it a vibrant one. However, such volume and diversity can be overwhelming to members trying to find their way through the photos. The tagging system, interestingness, group, and contact features are good tools, but are ultimately inadequate for introducing members to the photos and people that they would want to see but will probably miss in the sea of information. The Flickr Neighbrhood is another tool aimed at helping make that connection between a member and the photos and people on Flickr that he or she would likely want to know about. It recommends other members to look at, based on their favorites and the tags that they use. You might just find a kindred spirit.

The Flickr Neighbrhood can be visualized in two ways. The first is a stand-alone website that allows a member to submit his or her username and returns a list of eight Neighbrs who have similar Flickr affinities. The Flickr Neighbrhood is also integrated into a Greasemonkey script to display a list of four top Neighbrs on the member's Flickr homepage.

Links

Dedicated website interface: http://harbinger.sims.berkeley.edu/~gilby/neighbrhood.php

Greasemonkey script to integrate with Flickr.com: http://harbinger.sims.berkeley.edu/~gilby/FlickrNeighbrhood.user.js

43oogle

Members: Patti Bao

Description

43oogle is an interface that visualizes people's goals as listed on 43 Things in Google Maps. I wanted to explore what people in different cities want to do with their lives, and I thought it would be neat to have a space for identifying geographical trends in terms of local aspirations. Does where you live have an influence on what you dream about doing? Find out at 43oogle.

Links

For more information about the course, see: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu:8000/academics/courses/is290-4/s06/ or contact the instructor, Raymond Yee (yee@berkeley.edu)