Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland
"Since 1987 IRC researchers and students have been exploring the rapidly developing landscape of visual technology. Initial research involved high-end 3D computer animation to create rich worlds and characters. Visualizations of the otherwise invisible, ranging from biology to long-gone or unrealized architecture continue to be created at the IRC for national broadcast and current feature films.
As digital media tools became more powerful, the IRC began developing interactive, real-time virtual worlds that could respond to the decisions of an involved viewer. Researching and utilizing current game-art technologies, the IRC has created internationally recognized interactive visualizations for museums and other institutions. Additionally, pure research in real-time visualization has involved UMBC students in immersive projects that have attracted national attention.
Today, visualization capabilities have become all but limitless. At the same time, the role imagery plays in contemporary culture is of rising importance. Research at the IRC has expanded to include multidisciplinary research projects to better understand and realize an effective use of imagery to help culture process its most profound ideas. Understanding social media, online communities, and interactive collaborative virtual spaces are basic aspects of this research."
(Imaging Research Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Software is increasingly making a difference to the constitution and production of everyday life
"The reason that a focus on Web 2.0 is significant and needed is because the popular web applications it represents are driven by users providing endless and virtually unlimited information about their everyday lives. To put it in Lash's terms, they are clearly on the inside of the everyday, they are up close, they afford direct and routine connections between people and software. We have not yet begun to think through how this personal information might be harvested and used. A starting point would be to find out how this information about everyday mundane lives is being mined, how this feeds into ‘relational databases', and with what consequences: the very types of question that are being asked by the writers discussed here. Alongside this it is also important that we consider how the information provided by users, and other ‘similar' users, might affect the things they come across. If we return to Last.fm, which ‘learns' users' tastes and preferences and provides them with their own taste-specific online radio station, it is possible to appreciate how the music that people come across and listen to has become a consequence of algorithms. This is undoubtedly an expression of power, not of someone having power over someone else, but of the software making choices and connections in complex and unpredictable ways in order to shape the everyday experiences of the user. How we find the books that shape our writing could be a question we might ask ourselves if we wish to consider the power that algorithms exercise over us and over the formation of knowledge within our various disciplines. (I know of at least two occasions when Amazon has located a book of interest for me that has then gone on to form an important part of a published work.) This is not just about Amazon, it would also include searches on Google Scholar, the use of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us, the RSS feeds we might use, or the likely coming applications that will predict, locate and recommend research articles we might be interested in. Readers based in the UK will also by now be considering the power of algorithms to decide the allocation of research funding as the role of metrics in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) are finalized."
(David Beer, 996-997)
Beer, D. (2009). "Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious." New Media & Society 11(6).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
