The Shape of Alpha

The Shape of Alpha Aaron Straup Cope Where 2.0 May 2009

Hi, my name is Aaron

“The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began. Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act. [...] would love to avoid those problems if they could – who needs the tsouris? — but they canʼt. No one gets cataloging “right” in any perfect sense, and no algorithm returns the “correct” results. We know that, because we see it every day, in every large-scale system we use. No set of labels or algorithms solves anything once and for all; any working system for showing data to the user is a bag of optimizations and tradeoffs that are a lot worse than some Platonic ideal, but a lot better than nothing.” Clay Shirky

Metadata is worldview

“Location versus place”

Reverse geocoding

Bounding boxes

Inappropriate touching

Whoʼs on ﬁrst?

The reality

The “reality”

Synthetic telepathy

continent country region county maybe “metropolitan area” locality and airports (and “hollywood”) neighbourhood

North America 24865672 United States 23424977 California 2347563 San Francisco 12587707 “San Francisco Bay Area” “we suck” San Francisco 2487956 The Mission 2452334

Buckets of points

Connect the dots?

Alpha shapes!

the “mastro” Bag of optimizations?

IF YOU LIVED HERE!!! (Corrections)

Clustr

$> clustr -h clustr 0.21 - construct polygons from tagged points written by Schuyler Erle (c) 2007-2009 Yahoo!, Inc. code.ﬂickr.com Usage: clustr [-a <n>] [-p] [-v] <input> <output> -h, -? this help message -v be verbose (default: off) -a <n> set alpha value (default: use quot;optimalquot; value) -p output points to shapeﬁle, instead of polygons

You are here

Donut holes

The absence and the anchor

No, really

No GIS data was harmed

api = Flickr.API(...) req = Flickr.API.Request(method='flickr.places.getInfo', woe_id=3534) res = api.execute_request(req) SHAPES xml = elementtree.ElementTree.parse(res) shpfile = xml.find(“.//shapedata/url”)

mar23 -3.589138 37.176615 mar23 8.55027 47.410359 mar23 104.91085 11.565471 mar23 76.487388 12.860738 mar23 -122.413369 37.780475 mar23 8.55027 47.410359 mar23 8.55027 47.410359 mar23 -0.134603 51.510198 mar23 8.55027 47.410359 mar23 103.531723 10.601642 mar23 -0.878477 49.370609 mar23 -38.730154 -12.53831 POINTS mar23 127.127265 37.534776 mar23 -2.231297 53.465333 mar23 5.312672 60.399144 mar23 -0.651283 38.060864 mar23 4.417362 51.89821 mar23 -38.730154 -12.53831 mar23 11.249792 43.781857 mar23 -3.589138 37.176615 mar23 -2.292194 53.463448 mar23 -73.984658 40.727205

clustr = wsclustr.ec2(access_key='...', secret_key='...') clustr.startup(ami='ami-4d769124') MAPS (FROM SCRATCH) for a in (100, 10, 1, 0.1) : shpﬁle = clustr.clustr('/path/to/points.txt', alpha=a) clustr. shutdown()

mmmmm....data

/services/shapeﬁles/1.0 www.ﬂickr.com

Psychosynthography

Naked Lunch City

“Constellations of connections”

“Becoming the territory”

Thank you

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/02/24/an-abundant-present/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3182764164/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/2716828710/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/timo/sets/72057594109532582/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3377702505 YOU SHALL KNOW US BY OUR TOOLS http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3180283176/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunchwithcandy/2680466572/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3504862388/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickisconfused/3291840240/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3504929546/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/jan/30/mobilephones-startups http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3505864039/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahnw/3086144646/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/auggie_tolosa/3025514778/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/_mia/3445220156/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajagendorf25/3457595954/ http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/gadm/ http://www.flickr.com/places/France/ http://blip.tv/file/969021/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3504858798/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/416190643/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3442514097/ http://aaronland.info/talks/#where08 http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3444418523/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/angermann/3455505520/ http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/270-palestines-island-paradise-now-with-a-word-from-its-creator/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3133070488/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3204132340/ http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/projects97/belair/alpha.html http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.getInfo.html http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/08/08/location-keeping-it-real-on-the-streets-yo/ http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/04/07/the-only-question-left-is/ http://www.slideshare.net/straup/the-interpretation-of-bias/33 http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2009/04/12/hammock/#py-wsclustr-php http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3084890631/ http://www.mapsfromscratch.com/ http://code.flickr.com/svn/trunk/clustr/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3437832035/ http://www.flickr.com/places/US/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/dianeperson/3356117774/ http://www.flickr.com/places/US/TX/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/nitelynx/44189973/ http://www.flickr.com/places/HKG/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3459117321/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/3466918414/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/dogseats_bike/2999571556/ INSERT BAJA CANADA JOKE HERE http://www.flickr.com/photos/theincidental/3467181477/ http://magicalnihilism.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/the-map-becoming-the-territory/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/timo/2912270910/ http://www.aaronland.info/talks

The Shape of Alpha

by Aaron Cope

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

2 Embeds 13

Statistics

The Shape of Alpha Presentation Transcript

http://www.aaronland.info	12
http://aaronland.info	1