Civic Media

Dynamic Data Visualization for Interpretation of Social Networking Phenomena

brittenhouse6 — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 17:52:37 +0000

Dynamic Data Visualization for Interpretation of Social Networking Phenomena

This project seeks to understand the nature of misinformation on social media and its impacts on offline political behavior. Using the tools of computational social science, this project identifies, tracks, and detects misinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic on Twitter. Examining how misinformation spreads relative to true information about the pandemic allows the project to understand why misinformation spreads, whether it can be detected in real time, and what its effects are on offline political behavior.

This project employed three undergraduate students for the summer of 2020 and fall semester 2020. These students were Gaurav Sett, Abdulwahab (Sam) Jarkas, and Lindsay Schurtz. The students contributed to building code to scrape and analyze tweets taken from the Twitter social media platform. Tweets were analyzed with respect to content that was deemed to be misinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The students built algorithms to identify and track the spread of misinformation about Covid-19 from February 2020-June 2020. They were able to detect a sizable spike in Covid related misinformation in early 2020, which quickly subsided where it returned to a baseline of just a few percentage points of all tweets collected by March 2020.

The project has built tools and identified methods to detect misinformation in social media data streams. Further research will correlated the spread of this misinformation with public attitudes and violent events that occur offline.

brittenhouse6 Thu, 06/10/2021 - 13:52

Play Video

Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

We have not yet published any research related to this project, but I have successfully received further DILAC and GTRI HIVES IRAD funding to continue the nature of this project by investigating the link between misinformation spread on social media and radicalization by social media users against the democratic process in the United States. This includes events like violent protests against public health measures throughout 2020 to the Capitol insurrection in 2021.

Project Year

2020-21

2021-22

Project Leads

David Muchlinksi

Students

Guarav Sett

Abdulwahab Jarkas

Lindsay Schurtz

Project Format

Visualization

Genre Tags

Info viz

Civic Media

Text Analysis

Contact Email

david.muchlinski@inta.gatech.edu

An Interactive History of Racialized Urban Development in Atlanta

brittenhouse6 — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 15:09:47 +0000

An Interactive History of Racialized Urban Development in Atlanta

Our project is an ambitious digital research initiative that archives and presents the discriminatory experiences people of color had to live with at their places, including where current Georgia Tech students reside and study.

With the digitization of redlining maps (https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/), its research body has increasingly grown in the past few years. Most studies have taken the approach that examines how the poorly graded neighborhoods still face various hurdles in contemporary community development for such metrics as access to credits, healthy food markets, and public health. However, with only a few exceptions, no research has studied the “lived” experience of the African American residents in the affected communities. Our project will restore the forgotten history of these residents’ collective efforts in a storytelling way by examining the local context of community development.

The history of our local communities exists in various archives. But it remains forgotten to a broader audience unless it is re-archived digitally and distributed and educated through digital media. This project will be the first initiative and database of its kind, documenting our local communities’ lived experiences.

Specifically, beginning from Summer 2022, our expected deliverables by the end of Spring 2022 are:

Digital contents will be spread over two main sections, one covering the broad history of the Atlanta metropolitan area and the other specific to neighborhoods, both organized chronologically.
City-wide maps, including the initial 1938 Redlining Map, its successors, and overlays of interstate or urban renewal projects, will provide visual context. At this broader view, spatial comparisons will be made from maps that show access to healthy food, schools, healthcare, transportation, and safety from environmental hazards. This information will be displayed in a timeline format; singular events and policies will be displayed in a standard timeline format. For spatial data, there will be an option to display it next to similar data from a different time period.
Sections covering specific neighborhoods in the form of an interactive map will take a more personal character. Prominent community centers, people, and businesses within each will be showcased, using a combination of historical photos, records, and quotes when they can be found. These sections will also take a closer look at how city-wide policies impacted individual communities, especially policies that had a visible impact, such as the destruction of black-owned homes and businesses by interstate projects. For these events, the narrative will capture “local voices” of residents at that time.

brittenhouse6 Thu, 06/03/2021 - 11:09

Play Video

Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Brian An

Genre Tags

Info viz

Civic Media

Project Site

Project Storymap

Contact Email

yan74@gatech.edu

Screening Publics

brittenhouse6 — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:23:19 +0000

Screening Publics

Screening Publics is a public art project in collaboration with Cousins, a real estate development company here in Atlanta. Cousins’s property 725 Ponce is an eight-story building adjacent to the Eastside Beltline Trail, and it will be the site of a new outdoor screening series that LMC Associate Professor Greg Zinman will be responsible for curating over the next year or more, starting in Fall 2022. 725 Ponce will be one of the largest screens in the United States, has the potential to be one of the most significant sites for the art of the moving image in the entire world. The art of the moving image has transformed and continues to shape visual culture, and is an anchor of international art fairs and biennials. During the pandemic, we’ve seen a growing audience for video art and other alternatives to mainstream entertainment, and a desire for experiences of togetherness and connectivity. 725 Ponce is poised to be the perfect site to meet and foster that desire. The project also represents an opportunity to collaborate with other Atlanta arts institutions, and to situate Georgia Tech as a leader in innovating art programming for the public, thereby fulfilling the Institute’s stated values in its Strategic Plan to “celebrate collaboration” and “nurture the well-being of our community.”

Programs at 725 Ponce will likely include a survey of contemporary Black video art, family-friendly feature films (e.g. Singin’ in the Rain), a historical selection of experimental dance films, and a live projection-performance that makes use of the site’s state-of-the-art laser projector, projection mapping, and wireless personal audio via visitors’ smartphones.

Play Video

brittenhouse6 Wed, 06/02/2021 - 15:23

Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Greg Zinman

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Installation

Media Art

Contact Email

gzinman3@gatech.edu

Turbocharging Neighborhood Transformation in Latin America Through Digital Technology

aanupam3 — Thu, 14 May 2020 13:36:04 +0000

Turbocharging Neighborhood Transformation in Latin America Through Digital Technology

Poor neighborhoods in the developing world typically suffer from high levels of violence and low levels of school attendance and secondary school graduation. What if violence could be greatly reduced and education greatly enhanced with very small investments and targeted interventions? Our research in Brazil shows incredible promise. We developed a methodology to select local leaders having track records involving the use of innovation to transform youth in their neighborhoods. For example, one local leader in a tiny rough neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro uses samba dancing to train eventual Olympians in badminton (www.badbirdiemanfilm.com).

We provided small amounts of expansion money to a number of local social entrepreneurs. The local leaders and youth participants were showcased in the community through documentary films, children’s books, a film festival, and programs in 500 schools. This expanded the percentage of youth training in badminton every day, tremendously reducing violence and elevating school attendance.

The research project had involved 17 cases in the demonstration project, and a forthcoming book compellingly argues that the following elements produce much lower levels of violence, lower participation in gangs, and greater school attendance.
• Local “superhero” leaders
• Neighborhood as the unit of social change
• High-level performance as activity
• High-quality media products (film, books) with exciting features for young kids to entice the families and children to participate in the local programs.

This DILAC project will be used for student support of a vertically integrated project (Global Social Entrepreneurship) to incorporate animation, augmented reality, and other digital enhancements into the children’s books and films. There are 5 ongoing projects in Brazil and the students will develop the next project in Colombia.

aanupam3 Thu, 05/14/2020 - 09:36

Project Year

2020-21

Project Leads

Kirk S. Bowman

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Augmented Reality

Contact Email

kirk.bowman@inta.gatech.edu

The Hip Hop Archive as Design Issue

mmoattari3 — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 03:13:09 +0000

The Hip Hop Archive as Design Issue

The Four Four Beat Labs is a digital pedagogies incubator located in the School of LMC. It houses the HipHop2020 Maker Space, which is the developer of the HipHop2020 Curriculum Project or simply HipHop2020.

HipHop2020 is an interactive, hip-hop-inspired digital archive that guides users through a series of “storied spaces” representative of hip hop’s cultural impact, its transglobal sociopolitical influence, its canonical contributions to Black media studies, and its pedagogical sensibilities in K-12, post-secondary humanities instruction. We endeavor to intersect the design of play and design of pedagogy to enhance HipHop2020’s interactivity across multiple platforms (including personal computers, tablets, and mobile devices) and access points (including a website, WebGL, and VR).

To this aim, we currently have two design issues: narrative interactivity and database development, that is nuanced according to the three ways in which the archive is accessed: website, 3D immersion through desktop or tablet, and VR. The project will address these issues over the next year.

Play Video

During the 2018-2019 cycle, the web platform was redesigned to host basic content about the lab and archive with particular focus on the documentation of the archive’s acquisition via oral history; the creation of the lab’s podcast studio “FourCast”, with access to seasons 1 and 2 of “Hacking Hip Hop”, a podcast series produced by students enrolled in LMC 3206, 3306, as well as LMC 3258. Its goal is to use the podcast platform to “Crack the codes of critical activism through culture, media, and hip hop. We also integrated a membership/subscription plug-in through our web platform to provide potential subscribers access to hip-hop-inspired curriculum projects that are aligned with 9-12 and post-secondary educational standards for humanities as well as computational media instruction. The web platform will also link to hip-hop-inspired pedagogical approaches used in LMC 4720/4730. Although we endeavored to launch the web platform in Fall 2018, we demo’d in Spring 2019 and will have a soft launch at the end of June 2019. We also expanded both the interactivity and data management infrastructure of the digital archive. During the last phase of development for the Unity environment, we integrated an API which allows us to expand the scope of information made available to users in the Unity archive environment. In order to meet new demands, we intend to start leveraging multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS). Through AWS, we have been able to host digitized archival artifacts and musical metadata, and make data available to HipHop2020 applications through a custom-built API and make files available through a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This data infrastructure will not only make archival content available to HipHop2020 applications, but we can also use it to expose select data externally to 3rd parties. 3 Through collaborations with two community partners, one working with the Cartoon Network and the other an independent UX designer, one of the projects biggest accomplishments that I look forward to continuing with these senior designers is the buildout of the web platform, which has use positioned to scale to a mobile application, along with the 3D environment and our custom data management system are the three main accomplishments this year. We are better positioned to advance the web platform to a mobile application. We are poised to also license our own API to 3rd parties.

mmoattari3 Wed, 09/12/2018 - 23:13

Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

Delacoudray, C., Newton, S.H., Alemdar, M., Grossman, S., Garrett, S., Freeman, J., Wilson, J., Barbot, H., Moore, R.A., “Your Voice is Power: Integrating Computing, Music, Entrepreneurship, and Social Justice Learning,” Proceedings of Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), Virtual Conference, May 23-27, 2021. (Extended Abstract & Poster)
HipHop2020 Innovation Archive. Michael Webster Collection. Preserving Hip Hop Culture, Atlanta GA. Google Arts & Culture.
Wilson, J. (March 2021). On the capabilities of hip hop-inspired design thinking: An annotated syllabus. In E. Navas, O. Gallagher and X. Burrough (Eds.), The handbook of remix studies and digital humanities. United Kingdom: Routledge.

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

2020-21

2021-22

Project Leads

Joycelyn Wilson

Genre Tags

Project Site

Contact Email

joycelyn.wilson@lmc.gatech.edu

Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive

kkim733 — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 16:18:07 +0000

Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive

For more than 40 years, the US Navy maintained two military facilities in Vieques, a storage space for explosive and a bombing site to test weapons and conduct military exercises. In 2003, after years of community struggle against the military presence of the US Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico, President Bush transferred the military facilities to the United States Fish and Wild Life Service. The struggle for the demilitarization of Vieques has become a symbol of the resistance against colonial rule in Puerto Rico. In 2004, I had the opportunity of travelling to Vieques to record in video the testimonies of many Viequenses who participated in the struggle against the US Navy military presence in the island. These testimonies are an invaluable historical source to understand the history of Vieques in the context of two major transitions: a political transition from military to demilitarized zone, and an economic transition driven by tourism, real state investment, and farming as competing alternatives for development. These stories offer an intimate portrait of people who survived years of social exclusion in order to become protagonists of their own history. They also highlight the environmental and health problems created by the military uses of land as bombing sites, as well as the challenges of cleaning up vast areas of an island polluted with toxic waste. The story of Vieques can teach us how demilitarized communities confront social, economic, and environmental challenges while struggling to create civic-driven opportunities of sustainable development.

In order to share the lessons of the Vieques history with my students, and to honor the Vieques community by making their testimonies available to the general public, it is crucial to digitize and categorize this video archive composed of 107 hours of video footage. The purpose of this project is to:

Digitize all the videos
Transcribe all the interviews included in the videos to facilitate text searches of relevant topics
Create an annotation system based on categories that will facilitate the navigation of the digital video archive
Design a multi-semester course on digital video archives in which undergraduate students will participate in the various tasks involved in creating and using a digital video archive.
Travel to Vieques to conduct additional interviews for the archive, with a focus on the challenges that the island is facing after Hurricane Maria (losses in farming, lack of electricity, etc.)
Invite speakers to provide feedback on student projects

kkim733 Tue, 04/24/2018 - 12:18

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

2020-21

Project Leads

Juan C Rodriguez

Students

Mariam Moattari

Xinyi Chen

Genre Tags

Digital Archive

Civic Media

Project Site

Vieques Project Site

Contact Email

juan.rodriguez@modlangs.gatech.edu

Atlanta Map Room

kkim733 — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 16:12:55 +0000

Atlanta Map Room

This past year, the Local Data Design Lab joined with data artist Jer Thorp to undertake a new design research project called the “Map Room.” The overarching goal of the Map Room is to develop local spaces for grassroots map-making, where people can creatively and collaboratively explore data. Initial funding in the summer of 2018 enabled our team to build a map-making space on the Georgia Tech campus using our own custom software. We received support from the National Science Foundation (through the Civic Data Science program) in addition to the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center. The project has since grown into a multi-site research endeavour focused on understanding how local conditions can productively shape critical and creative inquiry into data. Our regional partners include ATL Maps, the Atlanta Department of City Planning, and the Atlanta History Center. We have also been invited to bring the project to other contexts, such as Savannah, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Boston, Dublin, Istanbul, and Washington D.C.

Our goal is to eventually support the development of 100 or more Map Rooms with arts and education-oriented foundation funding. Several publications about the Map Room are out or currently in the pipeline. An essay on our use of the project with Georgia Tech students to map the Atlanta BeltLine appeared in the Atlanta Studies Journal. The project is also introduced in a paper for CHI, the top conference in human-computer interaction, entitled “Engaging Gentrification as a Social Justice Issue in HCI.” Our paper scored in the top 3.5% of almost 3000 submissions. Coming up, the Map Room will be part of a juried exhibition at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. It is also the subject of a new article, currently under review for the “essays and provocations” section of the journal Big Data & Society.

kkim733 Mon, 04/23/2018 - 12:12

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Yanni A Loukissas

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Digital Archive

Installation

Project Site

Atlanta Map Room Project Site

Contact Email

yanni.loukissas@lmc.gatech.edu

Digital Deliberation and Social Justice in the Digital Age

kkim733 — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 15:58:39 +0000

Digital Deliberation and Social Justice in the Digital Age

Project Lead: Michael Hoffmann, PUBP, in collaboration with Carl DiSalvo, LMC, Carol Colatrella, LMC, Robert Rosenberger, PUPB, and Jenny Hirsch / Ruthie Yow, Serve-Learn-Sustain

How does the increasing digitization of almost everything affect the possibility of social justice? How can we develop the potential of digital technologies to reduce inequality and barriers to political and societal participation, and how should we react to possible threats posed by these technologies? To provide an opportunity for undergraduate students to engage with questions like these, the project Digital Deliberation and Social Justice in the Digital Age created, first, a new class on "Social Justice in the Digital Age" and, secondly, contributed to the development of the Reflect! platform which can be used in classes like this one as a tool to organize deliberation among students (https://reflect.gatech.edu/).

Since 2016, the VIP Digital Deliberation contributes to the development of the Reflect! platform which allows the management and guidance of large numbers of student teams that work over the course of a semester on a “wicked problem” such as facial recognition technologies in public places, robotic caregivers, artificial intelligence in the workplace, AI-based learning technologies, and micro-targeting in social media. The platform is designed based on principles of self-directed and problem-based learning.

Supported by a first DILAC grant, the VIP Digital Deliberation—an evolving, interdisciplinary team of undergrads — contributed substantially to fleshing out the first design of the Reflect! platform which has been coded (based on NSF funding) by Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC). Reflect! has been used in the spring and fall of 2018 in PHIL 3127 Science, Technology, and Human Values. Each semester the class had an enrollment of about 170 students from across campus who worked in about 40 teams of 4 or 5 students on a semester-long project.

A second DILAC grant funded two activities. First, supported by a GRA, the VIP team developed suggestions for an improved design of the Reflect! platform based on user feedback and their own usability testing. Additionally, the team started coding a new user interface.
The second activity of this second DILAC project was a collaboration of Carol Colatrella (LMC), Ruthie Yow (Serve-Learn-Sustain), Robert Rosenberger (PUPB), Mike Best (INTA/CS), and Michael Hoffmann (PUBP) that developed the design of a new undergraduate class “Social Justice in the Digital Age” in which projects can be supported by Reflect!. The design of this class has been discussed with the campus community at an ICLAST Roundtable on March 5, 2019. A template of a syllabus for this class has been completed. It is planned to teach the class for the first time in the fall of 2020. After a few further semesters of teaching the class, the project will request the inclusion of this new class in the Georgia Tech course catalogue as a class that is cross-listed between Public Policy, Philosophy, Literature, Media, and Communication, and Computer Science.

kkim733 Thu, 04/19/2018 - 11:58

Project Year

2016-17

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Michael Hoffmann

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Project Site

Reflect Project Site

Contact Email

m.hoffmann@gatech.edu

Climate Change Visualization in the Arctic and Beyond

morangi3 — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 14:26:47 +0000

Climate Change Visualization in the Arctic and Beyond

Communicating the impact of climate change is a challenge, as scientists, educators, and journalists have noted. The effects are difficult to empirically observe; in some ways, they are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Arctic documentary moving images about climate change can illustrate the negative effects of global warming. These images -- whether of thinning sea ice, melting glaciers, or rising sea levels are often used as “evidence,” sometimes paired with depictions of the social effects that the environmental transitions bring to communities in the Far North and around the world. The idea is that these images will generate cultural and behavioral change. At the same time, a substantial amount of data about climate change is conveyed through data visualization imagery. Some of those images are stationary in the form of maps, graphs (e.g., plotting), or charts, while quite a bit of data visualization consists of moving images, such as time lapse montages or dynamic 3D renditions. This kind of climate modeling and big data visualizations -- graphic moving image constructs -- tend to be mobilized as empirical evidence in climate change communication, yet like other forms of moving images, these are mediated constructs with their own histories and ideologies. Data visualization, has, however not been extensively studied as documentary moving images or as a distinct media form.

This project examines the interplay between climate change communication, documentary moving images about melting ice in the Arctic, and the procedures and assumptions of data visualization. In our primary research, we studied two different forms of moving images: timelapse photography and interactive data visualization of ice in the Arctic. We analyzed how certain visualizations can be more effective than others based on different theories of communication. To create a tangible product to test these communication theories, we decided to focus on ways to visualize climate change for Georgia Tech students. We believe that Georgia Tech students can be at the forefront of cultural and behavioral change when it comes to climate change. Our project focuses on encouraging students to think about climate change in their day-to-day behavior via an interactive visualization.

morangi3 Tue, 03/27/2018 - 10:26

Project Year

2017-18

Project Leads

Anna Stenport

Students

Victoria Chai

Genre Tags

Info viz

Civic Media

Contact Email

aws@gatech.edu

PARSE: Participatory Approaches to Researching Sensing Environments

morangi3 — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 16:08:27 +0000

PARSE: Participatory Approaches to Researching Sensing Environments

PARSE (Participatory Approaches to Researching Sensing Environments) is a multi-year project that combines design, the humanities, and social science methods to investigate the technologies and services of “Smart Cities.” By working together with communities, municipal government, and industry, the goal of this research is to collaboratively explore the issues and possibilities of distributed sensing in urban settings. Specifically, through co-design workshops and prototyping PARSE looks to identify and articulate the factors that shape and affect smart cities as socio-cultural systems, with implications for contemporary civics, sustainability, and diverse economies. The outcome of this research includes comparative case studies, frameworks for analysis and assessment, and use cases to inform engineering, policy, and strategy.

PARSE is supported by the National Science Foundation, Intel, and The Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In year 1 of the project (2016-2017) students and faculty worked together to design a toolkit and a workshop to support co-design and collaborative inquiry with communities. We conducted three workshops over the course of the year, engaging over 100 Atlanta residents. From these workshops we developed a set of scenarios describing smart city services from resident’s perspectives. These scenarios were published digitally as “Fictions for a Smart Atlanta” and this collection of scenarios has been distributed among city employees and is the basis for ongoing work. More than just another design project, the scenarios were developed to reflect humanistic perspectives, informed by recent discussion of feminist technoscience, diverse community economies, and issues and practice of care and repair.

The lead designer for year 1 was Trinh Nguyen. In the year 2 of the project (2017-2018) we are pursing further research and design based upon one of the scenarios in the “Fictions for a Smart Atlanta” collection. This is at the request of partners in the office of SmartATL in the City of Atlanta government. Through this work we will continue our processes of humanities informed participatory design and inquiry. The outcomes for year 2 will include a new workshop format, interviews with community advocates and city employees, multiple community engagement sessions, and an interactive prototype of a service aimed at addressing extreme weather events in Atlanta through community-based smart services.

In addition to public engagement and actionable research and design for the City of Atlanta, the PARSE projects are also an opportunity to directly explore and address pressing issues in the contemporary humanities. In particular the PARSE project explore materialist approaches to technology and politics, as well as engaging with emerging themes in infrastructure.

Project image from MIT’s Internet of Things Course Announcement

morangi3 Mon, 10/30/2017 - 12:08

Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

Project Leads

Carl DiSalvo

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Contact Email

cdisalvo@gatech.edu