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.
authors Giorgio Caviglia, Marco Quaggiotto, Donato Ricci, Gaia Scagnetti, Michele Graffieti, Samuel Granados Lopez, Daniele Guido
official website www.citymurmur.org
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.
authors Giorgio Caviglia, Marco Quaggiotto, Donato Ricci, Gaia Scagnetti, Michele Graffieti, Samuel Granados Lopez, Daniele Guido
official website www.citymurmur.org
How does a murmur come to life?
An allegoric explaination of the journey which takes a "Murmur" to be created.
An allegoric explaination of the journey which takes a "Murmur" to be created.
The media space is composed by a RSS feeds pool containing 733 sources (so far).Starting from an official list of Spanish media we classified all the sources and their RSS feeds through denotative categories (topic, type and impact).We tagged the RSS feeds also with connotative categories.Once the RSS feed is downloaded, an in depth scanning of the news is performed. Every news is matched against the OpenStreetMap street database to check if a street, a place of interest or a district is mentioned. When a news is related to a specific element of the city, a Murmur comes to life.
In order to reduce the possible divergence between the tags of the news item and their actual topic, a specific content analysis to gather more connotative (and possibly more accurate) tags, is performed.The news tags and the content analisys results are mixed up to produce a list of georeferenciated semantic keyword. Accordingly to the amount of Murmurs on each street, place of interest or district, the real topography of the city is deformed to produce a series of new maps. New media cartographies are drawn using OpenStreetMap data in order to show the geographical distribution of media attention on the city, and new semantic maps represent the semantic proximity of places while completely ignoring the city's geographic space: the result is a combination of an-exact overlapping pictures.
When the network of maps, diagrams and texts, are combined together the media geography appears and it is possible to understand its multifaceted reality.
In order to reduce the possible divergence between the tags of the news item and their actual topic, a specific content analysis to gather more connotative (and possibly more accurate) tags, is performed.The news tags and the content analisys results are mixed up to produce a list of georeferenciated semantic keyword. Accordingly to the amount of Murmurs on each street, place of interest or district, the real topography of the city is deformed to produce a series of new maps. New media cartographies are drawn using OpenStreetMap data in order to show the geographical distribution of media attention on the city, and new semantic maps represent the semantic proximity of places while completely ignoring the city's geographic space: the result is a combination of an-exact overlapping pictures.
When the network of maps, diagrams and texts, are combined together the media geography appears and it is possible to understand its multifaceted reality.
Madrid
madrid.citymurmur.org
madrid.citymurmur.org
New Orleans
neworleans.citymurmur.org
neworleans.citymurmur.org
